– BERLINALE 2026: Gore Verbinski returns with an AI apocalypse sci-fi comedy starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Juno Temple and Michael Peña
l-r: Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple, Michael Peña, Sam Rockwell, Zazie Beetz and Haley Lu Richardson in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Gore Verbinski, who won an Oscar for Rango and is certainly most widely known for the first three instalments in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga (but whose real claim to fame should be the best-ever Hollywood remake of a Japanese horror, The Ring), arrives a tad late to the post-apocalyptic AI game with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which has just had its European premiere at the Berlinale, as a Berlinale Special Gala screening. Starring Sam Rockwell and a strong cast of indie darlings, it’s a broad, if very kinetic, 132-minute sci-fi satire on the dangers of modern technology.
Shot in Cape Town, the film opens in a Los Angeles diner, with Rockwell arriving from the future (his character is even billed as Man from the Future), with a hobo beard and complexion, wearing a transparent plastic coat enveloped in wires and pipes, and what appears to be a collection of explosive devices attached to his chest. He explains to the scared patrons that this is the 117th time he has come back to the same place, in an attempt to prevent a nine-year-old genius from creating the AI that will destroy civilisation. He has to put together a team that will assist him, and every time, the combination is different. Now he is joined, mostly begrudgingly, by married high-school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), Susan (Juno Temple), whose son recently died in a school shooting, Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson, who stands out both for her performance and for the importance of her character), a young woman allergic to mobile phones and Wi-Fi.
We realise that the apocalypse has already begun through recent flashbacks involving some of the characters. Mark and Janet are faced with an army of AI slop-zombified teenagers, Susan gets her son cloned and encounters a support group of parents whose children keep getting shot in their schools, and Ingrid’s pizza-delivery boyfriend decides to switch from our reality to a VR-headset world. Of course, this is all the result of the same cause, represented by a pyramid symbol, which, in the film’s finale, unfortunately reminiscent in spirit of 1992’s Lawnmower Man, gets a confused and inconsistent explanation.
According to the press notes, Verbinski first read the script by Matthew Robinson (known for another apocalypse comedy, Love and Monsters) in 2020, and in the meantime, all of these ideas and concepts have been seen and regurgitated many times. The film is not without its merits, as some of the jokes do hit the right spots, Rockwell’s performance is manically charismatic, and the supporting cast do their best, but these elements never coalesce into an ensemble. The overly fragmented story with a bunch of underbaked, unnecessary segments and side characters makes the film feel like a jumbled collection of Black Mirror episodes, despite its clearly cinematic stylistic scope. Its indie spirit and spectacle ambition collide in James Whitaker’s cinematography, David Brisbin’s production design, the visual effects by Copenhagen-based Ghost VFX and Geoff Zanelli’s likeably bonkers musical score. But it’s editor Craig Wood whom we should probably be grateful to that the stitches of this bloated picture don’t completely come undone.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a co-production between Germany’s Constantin Film, and US companies Blind Wink Productions and 3 Arts Entertainment.
