Several AI Armageddon films have come and gone, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die feels more imminent than most. The most important subtext of the film is that this Armageddon is not happening in the far future; the nightmare is now. It is like a war film made during the time of the war. The first tell is its quirky, satirical take. When it comes to fiction, grounded takes of a dark and gloomy period in history are often represented after the travails of the time are in the rear view mirror. There is a reason why the most memorable, scathing critique of Hitler, when he was alive and at the height of his power, was Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. This is perhaps why the dark humour in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die feels appropriate.

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pena, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple

The slowly tightening grip of AI isn’t shown through censorship, mass unemployment or robot police beating up protestors. It is shown with how smartphone-hypnosis turns people into an army of zombies; with the capitalisation and the subsequent trivialization of grief when a mother mourning her dead child is offered cloning her boy as an option; and with how relationships are broken by a “better” alternate reality, the virtual kind. The most ubiquitous representation of AI subsuming culture, what has come to be termed as ‘AI slop’, is demonstrated in the form of a giant centaur cat with a long neck made of several tiny cats.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is like an updated, wackier version of Terminator. A soldier from the future travels back in time to stop the world-ending AI from going online, and the relationship between the mother and son plays a crucial role here as well. Sam Rockwell plays the plastic trench coat-wearing, homeless-looking “man from the future”. He arrives at a diner and announces that it is his 117th attempt to select the right combination of people from the diner to help accomplish his mission. Rockwell explodes in every scene as someone both worn-to-the-bone, going through the same thing for the hundredth time, while also being fuelled entirely by the absurdity of it all. He is like the futuristic hyper-active version of Jack Sparrow, guiding a weary crew through the chaotic wave of probabilities that are manipulated and restructured as obstacles by an AI trying to save itself.

The absurdist tone of the film stretches its limits towards the end, and as predicted, we get a volley of monologues between the AI and the “human” representative. However, the film folds its predictability within the AI’s meta-plan. I guess it was “all part of the plan” from the beginning. This isn’t a novel idea, but it somehow works because the film and its characters have adequately managed to charm us by then. The scale of the film being grounded and almost indie-like, Sam Rockwell’s character looking homeless, the grounded production design, and the low-budget visual effects all add to its charm. It feels deliberately designed to match the vibe of the central characters: scrappy humanity fighting against an omniscient superintelligence. Another clever thing about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is how it never fights against the supposed inevitability of AI dominance. Humanity is not trying to destroy AI; Rockwell’s man from the future just wants to install safety features before the “God” wakes up. The most important message of the film is encoded in the three backstories of people who join the crusade of the man from the future. Things start going bad the moment humans stop accepting their reality, which is when AI steps in to offer a “better” reality. A grieving mom ignores grief and accepts cloning her son; Students ignore the boredom of school life to accept the hypnotic allure of social media; a boyfriend ignores the love of his life to accept life inside a virtual reality game. Perhaps, it is not the nuclear bomb that gets to us but a dopamine bomb. And what is annihilated is not our cities but our freewill.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is the perfect encapsulation of our collective feelings on the current times. We know the world is changing at an unstoppable rate, but as a commoner, we don’t know what we are supposed to do, and we don’t know whether it is even appropriate to relax and enjoy the benefits of AI. I guess all we can do is to share this affirmation to ourselves and to each other: Good luck, have Fun, don't die.