Yelling at Nothing

I’m still a firm believer in my rule of “celebrate the stuff you like, ignore the stuff you don’t.”1 So there’s not a lot worth saying about how much I disliked Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die2 as a movie. Like how it was so tedious, a two-plus hour movie that felt like four or five. Or how it had lots of truly exceptional talent, but kept putting them in scenes with seemingly no direction, making the whole thing feel like an amateurish YouTube comedy video.3

I will say that the plot is about a man played by Sam Rockwell coming back from a post-apocalyptic future, to stop the creation of an AI singularity that will bring about the downfall of society. And it’s ironic that AI is the villain, because there’s barely a single image in the entire movie that feels original or memorable; everything feels like the least inspired and most obvious choice, taken from other media.

The only image that comes close to feeling new and original is that of a giant centaur cat made from smaller cats, walking through a residential neighborhood eating people. That, combined with the audacity of an earlier sequence with Juno Temple as the single mother of a child killed in a school shooting, were just enough to keep me from writing off the movie as a completely unoriginal waste of time. But then I thought about it for a few seconds, and I realized that the giant cat is just the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Not that it feels similar, but it’s used exactly the same way as in a movie from 1984.

My initial take on all of it was that it felt like some crusty old relic, a movie dug up from a time capsule from the early 2000s, and it had been derivative even then. It’s like if the phrase “ok, boomer” had been turned into a motion picture. I would’ve been content to just roll my eyes and make a wanking gesture, and then let it be quickly forgotten.4

But I realized that it had somehow crossed the line from tasteless and irrelevant to genuinely offensive. And offensive in a way that’s depressingly relevant. I can’t imagine a coherent read of this movie that’s anything other than conservative propaganda.

The bulk of it just feels like “Old Man Yells At Cloud” ranting. It starts with what’s essentially an extended monologue from Rockwell, chastising people in a diner for staring at their damn phones while the world is falling apart around them. Shortly afterwards there’s a flashback that’s only remarkable for having Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz and making them annoying and uninteresting, something I’d never imagined possible. The gist of this whole sequence is just how hard teachers have it nowadays, with the scary, surly teens and their smart phones, scrolling numbly through Tik Tok all day.

Later, there’s another sequence that’s all about Haley Lu Richardson as a woman who’s literally allergic to phones and WiFi, finding her soulmate in a guy who has also made a pledge to reject modern online technology, and then losing him to the temptation of virtual reality.

It’s all lazy, hopelessly dated, and completely devoid of insight, feeling like someone who read an article about emerging tech in Wired 20 years ago and has been fuming about it ever since. Now they’ve appointed themselves a modern-day Cassandra, screaming about the dangers of The Screens to a society that refuses to listen. It feels like 2025 tech commentary from someone who still refers to everything they do on a computer as “that program.” It feels like a movie that had to halt production periodically to get help, since now all the icons were in a different place and they can’t find the one they always use.

The only exception is that sequence about the aftermath of a school shooting. The idea is seeded in the earlier flashback, as the school day stops for a shooting incident, and it’s treated as something as common and mundane as a fire drill. The point there is just to underscore that idea of how scary and downright insolent The Teens are. But I’ll be super-extra generous to the movie, and assume that it was supposed to feel more light-hearted here so that it’d feel like a shocking gut-punch later, when we see it from the perspective of someone who as actually affected by it.

That sequence with Temple is the closest the movie gets to actually working. It’s shockingly tasteless, but that’s the point — it’s about how one of the most horrific things that can possibly happen has become so common now that people are numb to it, and an entire sub-industry has developed around it. The mom finds a shadow network of support groups and an organization that will clone murdered kids, replacing them with a copy that is almost as good as the real thing. Temple’s character then is connected to an even more shadowy group that will give her a device that lets her communicate with the real version of her murdered son.

Honestly, if that whole sequence had been removed from the rest of the context of the movie, it would’ve worked okay. It would’ve been like a C-tier Black Mirror episode. The tastelessness, the refusal to suggest a solution, and again the audacity of it, might’ve worked as black satire. An angry wake-up call demanding that people take it seriously.

But instead, it’s in this movie. Which undermines any potential impact by making it feel irrelevant, since it just makes a lazy hand-waving gesture at the problem, insisting that it’s all this dang technology that we’ve gotten so dependent on! And worse, it feels dated and toothless, since it’s either unaware or unwilling to admit that we have all figured out who and what are causing the problems.

As soon as I heard the stated premise of Rockwell’s character’s plan, I thought “well that’s a load of bullshit.” It’s stated that the world-destroying AI is being developed right now by some genius ninth-grade kid in a bedroom in a residential area of Los Angeles. Their mission is to get in there and plug in a USB drive that will override the AI’s programming and put the necessary safety protocols in place.

The problem isn’t that this all sounds like hand-waving nonsense from someone who’s never used a computer apart from Outlook before. It’s actually fine that the mechanism is just a MacGuffin, in a deliberately ludicrous story that’s not about technology so much as its impact on humans. The problem is that it perpetuates the bullshit mythos about “AI” that has already been incorporated into the hype bubble and scam that’s actually impacting humans.

Even Terminator and Terminator 2 had the foresight to implicate corporations in the fall of humanity. Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die refuses to acknowledge the existence of anyone outside of its characters (and by extension, its audience). It passes itself off as a satire of gun violence that never once shows the police, and has multiple scenes using gun violence as a “black comedy” punchline, responding with a shrug. It passes itself off as a warning about the dangers of technology without ever mentioning tech companies. It’s all created by this one genius kid working away in his bedroom.

This is like making a movie about climate change without once mentioning oil companies or auto manufacturers, and instead spending over two hours chastising the audience for using plastic straws. It’s an indictment of out-of-control technology and AI that could have been executive produced by Sam Altman.

But wait! The end of the movie has a huge twist!5 The AI wasn’t actually created by a kid in his bedroom! That kid was a clone, and it was actually just a case of the sentient, omnipotent AI creating itself! It presented you with this false happy ending to keep you comfortable, complacent, and compliant!

Don’t you feel silly now, dismissing this movie as nothing more than an edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy screed against the threat of technology? Weren’t you spending the whole time focused on tech as the obvious villain, while ignoring the deeply humanist message at its core?

Well no, actually. The ending is the final push that transforms this noxious fart of a movie into a wet, steaming, turd.

Just for the sake of showing some grace to the movie, assuming incompetence instead of actual malice, I won’t concentrate on how it turns Temple’s story from “tasteless” to deeply offensive. Because it refuses to implicate anyone outside the movie in the problem of gun violence, it only points a finger at her and her handling of it. The real, actionable problem, see, is that she was looking to be placated and comforted by a cloned or AI-generated replacement for her son, instead of the irreplaceable, real person. “Maybe if you’d set some limits on screen time and spent more quality time with your child, he wouldn’t have been murdered.”

After all, the final scene has Rockwell realizing he was wrong to leave his mom behind so many times, and they’re going to solve this problem together!6 That solution: give everybody in the world the same allergy she has, to physically force everyone to avoid technology!

In other words: don’t worry, big tech (and especially tech companies who’ll invest in funding movies like this), this is just a silly fantasy! We’re not going to offer any real solutions to relevant social problems. We’re going to “carbon offset” it, reminding people that the most beautiful world is the one that exists off your screen, and we can make that world happen together. Somehow. Maybe you can start by putting down your TikToks and reading a damn book for once!

Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s total bullshit to claim that your movie has a humanist message, when you treat its characters as disposable.7 I think it’s bullshit to even approach the topic of school shootings if you not only have gun violence played for comedic effect, but you flat-out refuse to acknowledge that we are all fully aware of the network of politicians, lobbyists, manufacturers, and special-interest groups that perpetuate it. Instead, this bullshit movie treats it as if it were just something that happens, like earthquakes.

And by presenting an omnipotent AI that, as it turns out, somehow went back in time and set up the sequence of events to create itself, it makes this movie contain pretty much every single part of the bullshit AI hype bubble scam:

It’s just the ceaseless advance of technology, created by geniuses cranking away independently on a problem, much like Jobs and Wozniak in their garage!

It’s so inevitable, in fact, that even its creators aren’t really complicit!

You can’t hope to possibly stop it, or even control it; it’s much too complex and sophisticated for that!

Hell, even geniuses don’t fully understand how it works!

Everything that went into training and developing it is just this unspecified, untagged flow of valueless data that it would’ve sucked up eventually on its own! (Don’t think about how many years we spent data scraping and ignoring copyright!)

Some kid could accidentally create this thing in his bedroom; it’s certainly not the result of gigantic companies hoarding resources to make something that can only ever be replicated or even controlled by the richest people on Earth!

Now that it exists, it’s out there (which again, was bound to happen anyway, so why are you even mad?) and the best we can do is to control how we react to it!

Again, this is a movie that is so adamant about not assigning blame to anyone but the people who are least responsible, that it feels regressive even compared to Terminator 2, which came out 35 years ago.

When I left Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, I was left with the impression that it was gross but harmless, ultimately yelling at nothing. Just a few minutes thinking about it makes me realize it’s even worse. It’s deeply ironic that it has a takeaway message about technology lulling people into a sense of complacency, since it’s a movie that’s designed to do exactly that.

1
Which is why I haven’t mentioned on here that I finally saw Scary Movie last week.

2
Alternate title: We Have 12 Monkeys At Home

3
The ending has a shot where our bald kid villain looks directly into the camera and does an air guitar, which on its own would’ve been bad enough. But he just wanders out of the shot, as if the actors hadn’t been given any direction stronger than “just mill around in the front yard,” and they’d gotten tired of editing their own movie by that point.

4
After biting my tongue through an initial wave of reviews that call it daring, innovative, or insightful, or exactly the wake-up call we need right now and such.

5
And not just the reveal of Rockwell’s mother, a mystery so masterfully constructed that the only way you possibly could have predicted it would be if you’d seen literally any other piece of fictional media in your lifetime.

6
To begrudgingly give the movie some credit, there was exactly one line of dialogue in the whole thing that was kind of clever: Rockwell acknowledges that he knows Ingrid is pregnant, and they both know who the baby will grow up to be. She asks him, “do you think I should keep it?”

7
If I were feeling more accusatory, I’d point out how all of the disposable characters in the team are played by actors who Hollywood would consider overweight.

1 Which is why I haven’t mentioned on here that I finally saw Scary Movie last week.

2 Alternate title: We Have 12 Monkeys At Home

3 The ending has a shot where our bald kid villain looks directly into the camera and does an air guitar, which on its own would’ve been bad enough. But he just wanders out of the shot, as if the actors hadn’t been given any direction stronger than “just mill around in the front yard,” and they’d gotten tired of editing their own movie by that point.

4 After biting my tongue through an initial wave of reviews that call it daring, innovative, or insightful, or exactly the wake-up call we need right now and such.

5 And not just the reveal of Rockwell’s mother, a mystery so masterfully constructed that the only way you possibly could have predicted it would be if you’d seen literally any other piece of fictional media in your lifetime.

6 To begrudgingly give the movie some credit, there was exactly one line of dialogue in the whole thing that was kind of clever: Rockwell acknowledges that he knows Ingrid is pregnant, and they both know who the baby will grow up to be. She asks him, “do you think I should keep it?”

7 If I were feeling more accusatory, I’d point out how all of the disposable characters in the team are played by actors who Hollywood would consider overweight.