If you've been online this week, you've probably seen at least one hot take about AI eating the world. But while most of that discourse plays out in LinkedIn posts and Senate committee hearings, Gore Verbinski has made a whole film about it, and it looks genuinely unhinged in the best possible way.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die marks Verbinski's return to feature filmmaking after nine years away. The director who gave us the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, the skin-crawling dread of The Ring (2002), and the Oscar-winning animated chaos of Rango (2011) is back, and he has not mellowed with age.
Sam Rockwell plays an unnamed man who arrives at a Norms diner in Los Angeles looking every bit the apocalypse survivor. He claims to be a time traveller on his 117th attempt to assemble the right team of strangers to prevent a rogue AI from destroying civilisation. The diner patrons are, understandably, sceptical. His trump card: he knows everything about every person in the room.
The team he assembles includes married schoolteachers Mark (Michael Pena) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), fresh from fleeing a horde of smartphone-zombified students; Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother; Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is literally allergic to Wi-Fi; and a scout leader named Bob. Their mission is to stop a nine-year-old boy from creating the sentient AI that ends the world. Things go sideways almost immediately.
Screenwriter Matthew Robinson, whose credits include The Invention of Lying and Love and Monsters, describes his working method with characteristic clarity. "Everything I write, I put up to what I call The Twilight Zone test: would this make a good Twilight Zone episode?" Robinson told Ars Technica. "Because that's my favourite piece of media that's ever existed."
The film began as a collection of separate ideas, each orbiting the theme of technology and addiction. The teachers' storyline started as a pitch for a pilot Robinson described as "a reverse Breakfast Club, where the teachers are the rebels and the children are the conformists." The connective tissue came one night while sitting in the actual Norms Diner on La Cienega in LA, where he often wrote.
"I remember looking around and seeing a sea of faces lit by cell phones, and I thought, 'What would it possibly take for someone to wake us up out of this tech sleep that we all find ourselves in?' And then the image of a homeless guy strapped with bombs came into my head."
Robinson likens the film's structure to a sci-fi Canterbury Tales, with each character functioning as a pilgrim whose backstory unfolds through flashbacks. It is, he acknowledges, effectively an anthology film, a format he calls "the kiss of death" in Hollywood. The notable exceptions, like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, tend to succeed by giving the audience a strong enough through-line to keep them anchored.
Here's what nobody's talking about in the broader AI discourse: the most interesting cultural responses to our tech anxieties are not coming from regulators or ethicists. They are coming from filmmakers willing to get properly weird about it.
Verbinski developed two distinct visual styles to carry the film's tonal progression. Early scenes are grounded and performance-driven, evoking directors like Hal Ashby and Sidney Lumet. As the AI antagonist looms larger, the cinematography grows more expressive and compositionally aggressive. "As these anomalies occur, the film is evolving into a second visual style," Verbinski explained. "The actual language of shots becomes more critical to the narrative."
The third act, by both filmmakers' accounts, goes full spectacle. Robinson cites the animated film Akira as the template. "Akira has maybe my favourite third act of all time, where everything just falls apart and then comes together in this beautiful way," he said. "Gore and I wanted the audience to feel like reality was unravelling, because it literally is for these characters."
Verbinski's framing of the project is worth sitting with. "I think we're in this kind of global ennui, or some grand sense of identity theft or loss of purpose," he told Ars Technica. "It's a great time for art, but it's art against a profound sense of disillusionment." That tension between entertainment and genuine cultural anxiety is exactly where the best genre films live.
For Australian audiences, films like this arrive as a reminder that science fiction is doing some of the most honest cultural work of the moment. The conversation about AI, addiction, and what technology is doing to human attention is not abstract; it is playing out in classrooms, workplaces, and living rooms right now. That a time-loop comedy with Sam Rockwell might be saying something genuinely true about all of it is, frankly, very on-brand for Gore Verbinski.
Is it actually good, though? On the evidence of everything both filmmakers describe, it at least sounds like the rare studio-adjacent film that was built to be argued about rather than forgotten. And in a cinema culture increasingly dominated by what Verbinski calls "Egg McMuffin" movies, that is no small thing.