Gore Verbinski hasn’t directed a feature film in a decade, which is the kind of hiatus that makes you wonder if he’s been secretly living in a remote compound preparing for the apocalypse. Based on his return to cinema, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the answer is yes—and he’s brought back footage of exactly how that apocalypse will happen. Spoiler alert: it involves smartphones, cloning, and Sam Rockwell having absolutely no chill whatsoever.
The premise takes the skeleton of The Terminator and feeds it through a blender of modern anxieties about artificial intelligence and generational conflict. Rockwell plays an unnamed man who bursts into a nondescript Los Angeles diner claiming he’s traveled from the future to stop the end of the world.
Unlike Kyle Reese, who was sweaty but stable, Rockwell’s time traveler appears genuinely unhinged—manic, desperate, and operating on the hundredth iteration of trying to assemble the exact right team of ordinary people who can defeat an AI before it brings about doomsday.
His recruits include Susan, a bereaved mother played by Juno Temple; Janet and Mark, teachers terrorized by their students, played by Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña; and various other diners who represent the specific combination of skills and trauma necessary to save humanity. The film asks you to believe that the fate of civilization rests on a group of people who were just trying to eat pancakes in peace, which is either brilliantly democratic or deeply insulting to actual emergency preparedness protocols.
Verbinski, working from a script by Matthew Robinson, brings his horror background to the proceedings, inventing new versions of classic monsters that reflect contemporary fears. The AI threat manifests through TikTok-obsessed teens who become something far more dangerous than annoying—their phone usage literally turning them into zombies in sequences that feel both implausibly futuristic and boomer-coded in their critique of youth culture.
Yes, criticizing teens for screen time is regressive, but when the resulting creatures look this cool, you forgive the heavy-handedness.
Rockwell carries the film with the irrepressible twinkle and deep trauma that have become his trademarks. There’s no dancing here—though if you’ve seen Seven Psychopaths or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, you know what he’s capable of—but there is plenty of fast-paced dialogue delivered with the twitchiness of a man who has watched the world end ninety-nine times already.
His character’s sanity remains questionable throughout, creating tension not just about whether the mission will succeed but whether the mission is even real.
The film struggles occasionally with its own ambition, cramming in so many ideas—cloning technology, time-loop mechanics, social media anxiety, homemade AI—that coherence sometimes takes a backseat to spectacle. Extensive flashbacks provide context for various characters but stall the momentum in ways that suggest this might have worked better as an anthology series where each episode could breathe.
As a feature, it occasionally feels like it’s racing against its own runtime to resolve plot points it introduced five minutes ago.
Still, when Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die focuses on Rockwell’s man-on-a-mission energy and Verbinski’s eye for grotesque invention, it delivers the kind of mid-budget sci-fi thriller that studios rarely make anymore. It’s messy in the way that original ideas often are, prioritizing ambition over polish, and asking questions about technology’s relationship to reality that it doesn’t always have time to answer.
The future already seems perilous, and fiction has to work hard to stand out. This one earns its place through sheer force of personality and the creeping suspicion that Rockwell’s character might actually be right about everything.
Don’t miss the apocalypse—catch Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die in theaters and watch Sam Rockwell try to save humanity from its own algorithms.
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