Here’s one way to face the artificial intelligence apocalypse: with human intelligence.Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is proof that AI simply can’t match the imagination of living-breathing-thinking humans. At least, not yet.The sci-fi comedy is based on an inventive and layered script by Matthew Robinson, which takes in AI, virtual reality, video games, human cloning and even the internet’s love for cat videos. Zany, visually striking, energetically performed and thought-provoking too, the film is this year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die can be rented from Prime Video. The story begins at a restaurant, where an unnamed man known simply as The Man (Sam Rockwell) arrives from the future to announce the collapse of civilisation and his proposed solution.The Man has done this numerous times before. He’s caught in a time loop. But he’s been unable to recruit rebels for his mission to prevent AI from being invented. It doesn’t help that he looks like he’s emerged from a garbage heap, or that he harangues the diners as being complicit in their erasure.
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Then, Susan (Juno Temple) raises her hand. Others volunteer too, including Susan’s Uber driver (Asim Chaudhary), Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) and the teacher couple Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Pena).They follow The Man into a chaotic adventure that involves rats, a giant Centaur that is made up of kittens, masked men and a talking dog. Flashbacks to the back stories of the key volunteers explain how each of them has been affected by rampaging technology.After losing her son in a school shooting, Susan agrees to have him cloned. Would she be okay with a version that has embedded commercials?Mark is distressed at having to teach a classroom of cellphone-addicted students who wonder whether Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is YA fiction. Ingrid has a rare condition: she is allergic to cellphones and Wi-Fi.Comic timing is in lockstep with Gore Verbinski’s skill at deploying visual effects at the service of the story. Some of the scenes are stunningly realised, especially when the group meets the very young creator of AI.Matthew Robinson’s screenplay steadily builds up to a hilarious climax that reveals AI’s ability to turn truth on its head. The AI train has already left the station and we’re just trying to install some-last minute brakes, The Man declares, perhaps correctly.The 134-minute movie speaks to a reality that has already upon us. The future The Man warns of isn’t outlandish to imagine. AI might well destroy everything we hold dear, but there will be films like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die to remind us that machine learning can never trump the human brain.









