Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

This was an eagerly anticipated movie for me. Reviewers I like recommended it with great enthusiasm. It has time travel, for which I am a total sucker. It has Sam Rockwell, who is one of my favorite actors. It wasn't a question for me of whether or not I would like it, for a hundred things would have to go wrong for that to happen; it was how much I'd like it. As you can tell by the rating, the answer is a damned lot. It is perhaps a little too ambitious while also being a little scattered, but that's overwhelmed by its staggering amount of imagination and Sam Rockwell being Sam Rockwell. It's best to go into this movie blind, so I'll keep the story synopsis brief: Rockwell plays a man from the future (he's never named) who time travels back to an unspecified year in his past (but likely the future from where we are) to recruit people to help him stop the development of an advanced AI that will destroy the world. Good Luck is a movie that demands you sit down, shut up, hold on, and toss all questions overboard. The plot kicks in barely two minutes after the opening credits, never for a moment stops for a breath, and certainly does not allow time for questions. If you need things spelled out, if you can't stand some unanswered questions, if you can't get past a movie that lays out an audacious concept and says "accept it or get it", then this isn't for you. But if you're willing to meet this movie where it lives and go along with it as-is, you're going to be in for one wild, mile-a-minute ride. A movie that never once for a moment runs out of ideas, and is never afraid to commit to one even if it's nonsensical. A movie unafraid to be subversive, but not in that arrogant, flexing-my-intelligence Rian Johnson way; it subverts expectations because it says, from the outset, that expectations should be checked at the door in the first place. What does bring Good Luck down a peg, though -- and what might turn some people off -- is its brazen, on-the-nose attempts at commentary on modern society and technology. Good Luck is strongly and unapologetically anti-AI, which I applaud. But its anti-technology bent doesn't stop there, and by the time it's finished taking shots at a Nixonian enemies list of modern tech, it starts to feel like a cranky Boomer ranting about missing the days of antennas on TV's and kids playing stickball in the street. If it had picked one gripe and zoomed in on it, it would've been fine, but running the gauntlet of AI, cell phones, social media, VR, AND cloning, it sounds like pointless, curmudgeonly wanking. If it sounds like I'm turning it into a fatal flaw, I promise I'm not ... but I can see how some might find it to be just too much, too. That's the story of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die; it's a movie that is possibly over-stuffed with ideas and themes that you will either find to be precariously but delicately balanced, or one that collapses under its weight. I think if one goes in with measured expectations -- knowing Good Luck will be an avalanche of ideas instead of a steady stream -- one might be prepared to enjoy it. But if you can't approach this movie on its terms, it is going to overwhelm or exhaust. I went in expecting crazy, and that's what I got, and I'm more than happy with it. Try to do the same, and you'll probably come out like I did.