An Amusing AI Apocalypse in 'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die'

"He is there, while customers sip coffee and bite into an omelet, to enlist recruits for the resistance. In the future, he says, people have entirely stopped participating in life. "It all started with morning phone time," he says. In the enjoyably oddball, forebodingly bleak and ridiculously plausible Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, a ragtag group fights a coming AI apocalypse across a handful of nondescript West Hollywood blocks."

"As in most sci-fi movies, the set up of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is better than its follow through. But the movie has a kinetic kick, and you could argue that it's obsessed with the right things. We could use more movies similarly engaged. Even if not every part of this particular mission is a success, like the numbers game of Rockwell's protagonist, eventually one will get through."

An unnamed man claiming to be from the future appears in a Los Angeles diner and warns that pervasive phone and Wi-Fi habits will lead to societal collapse. He enlists recruits for a resistance that includes Ingrid, who is allergic to phones and Wi‑Fi, two high school teachers, and Janet, whose students never look up from screens. A boyfriend's descent into virtual reality illustrates how technology erodes real-life participation. The central figure carries a countdown to an imminent attack while the group attempts to halt an AI-driven apocalypse concentrated on a few West Hollywood blocks. The film pairs lush detail and movie-reference flourishes with a limited large-scale climax.

Read at Kqed