GLHFDD

A timely, weird movie (Massive Spoilers)

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die starts with a man (Sam Rockwell) walking into a diner and taking the people eating their hostage. He says he’s from the future, the whole world is going to end because of an artificial intelligence, and he’s travelled through time to collect a group of people to stop it. What we have here is another “you should watch the movie first” and “proceed with caution” review because the above is all I can say without spoiling something.

Take, for instance, the film’s anarchistic order that fills in the characters’ backstories. At first, you could be forgiven for thinking that Future Man (NSFW) is simply crazy and not from the future, until we get to the first vignette about Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz). That one decidedly shows that the AI threat is real when their high school students turn into phone zombies or pod people.

Blending more than two genres into a film is very tricky to pull off. Still, as shown by GLHFDD, it can be very rewarding if done correctly. For instance, I was not expecting a tragic love story, but this movie does that so well with Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), the group member with an allergy to cellphones and Wi-Fi. It’s no wonder she became so suicidal when, after a lifetime of loneliness, she falls in love with a Luddite and then also loses him to technology. 

This movie’s hard stance against technology is evident from the get-go. One of the first things we see in the diner is everyone on their phones instead of talking to one another. The opening scene alone has Future Man go on this long tirade about how, among other things, no one can remember people’s phone numbers anymore. I found myself getting a little irritated by what GLHFDD is saying, despite the validity, which I chalk up to my own reliance on technology.

An Uncomfortable Mirror

I typed this review on a computer.  I edited this review with the help of Grammarly, though I don’t use the AI assistant or mindlessly follow every suggestion. If you’re reading this, you’re likely doing so off my website. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I should stop spending so much time on social media, but not because it’s addictive. It’s because I realized that all of that scrolling isn’t making me happier.

That leads me to one of the most poignant themes of GLHFDD. The positive stimuli brought about by using technology are addictive. When warning the group about what they’re up against, Future Man even says that the AI will give you challenges and hurdles before rewarding you with everything that you ever wanted, but it’ll just be a shallow distraction and a lie. That statement directly foreshadows the cruel twist ending.

The surviving members of the group seemingly manage to stop the AI by uploading the safeguards it should have been designed with in the first place, but it turns out to be a simulation. Of course, given Future Man’s earlier line about how the AI never managed to get him, I was expecting an even darker twist where his entire time travel quest, from the moment he found a VR headset as a kid, was only him in a simulation.

Instead, the film does end with a glimmer of hope. Upon realizing everything’s too nice and neat, Future Man goes back in time to try again. Earlier, he stated that the reason for uploading the safety protocols is that AI is inevitable, and the best they can do is make sure it doesn’t destroy the world, which is a nuanced view. However, after trying and failing to do that 117 times, he decides the best course of action is to give everyone Ingrid’s allergy. Did I by chance mention that this movie’s very anti-technology?

There’s something deeply ironic about how, despite its message, GLHFDD still uses a large amount of CGI. However, let’s not get into that ad hominem s**t. GLHFDD is a timely and entertaining science fiction, drama, comedy, horror, and action movie. Rockwell is outstanding in a lead role that very few people could pull off. The other performances and the directing were also top-notch.