Movies & TV Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Has a Unique Take on Time Loop Stories Let’s go ham on the apocalypse, with glitter and kittens. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on February 13, 2026 Screenshot: Briarcliff Entertainment Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Briarcliff Entertainment As we tread further into the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and Black Mirror-ified versions of our collective future, we’re forced to ask different questions about these sorts of stories: How do we make them unique, yes, but more importantly, how do we keep them in the realm of fiction? How do we remove these stories enough from what is recognizable that we can accept them as cautionary clarion calls rather than documentary-style misery trains? There are many options to consider… but the answer that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die supplies is to go ham on your incoming apocalypse. Bend some rules, keep your tone just shy of absurdity, layer your laughs betwixt brackets of despair, and you might have yourself a winning formula. A man (Sam Rockwell) enters Norm’s Diner on any old evening to recruit a team from its occupants: He’s from the future, and he’s already attempted his mission over 170 times, but that’s not slowing him down. If he can manage the feat, he will divert an impending AI-driven apocalypse that starts that very night. Everyone thinks he’s nuts, of course, but he threatens the crowd with a bomb and reveals that he knows quite a bit about them all already. He then selects his team, and they begin the uneasy trek to a house six blocks away—avoiding the cops, some mercenaries, and one very unhappy guy with a machete along the way. (There are other obstacles, of course, but they’ve been carefully marked out on a grubby map, assembled from knowledge gained on previous attempts.) One of the cleverest aspects of Matthew Robinson’s script is offering up what is technically a “time loop” story where we really only observe a single loop. Rather than ratcheting up the tension using endless permutations à la Groundhog Day or The Edge of Tomorrow or Happy Death Day), we sink in on one run, and pin all our hopes to it. We get to toy with the timeline in other ways, however; there are several vignettes that offer context for Rockwell’s crew in flashback form. It’s en enjoyable diversion from the typical arc that makes the whole experience more unpredictable, but there’s another purpose in it: These flashbacks make it clear that while it may have looked like just our world at the outset, this is some form of near future or alternative reality where things have already deteriorated to a frightening degree. In that respect, the film is either going to feel like the terrified echoes of your own mind, or like the ramblings of someone petrified of a future you’ve already accepted. Folks in the second camp aren’t likely to enjoy what they find. The movie is pretty firm on what to make of people who spend every waking moment fixed to their phone screens, idly thumbing likes and hearts, and leaving nasty comments for strangers. “Kids these days” don’t get a pass for being kids in this version of the apocalypse; they’re just zombies waiting to cross over into the living braindead. This is the world they were given, but even if they’re victims of it, it makes no difference to the great AI hivemind. The leading role seems tailor-made to Sam Rockwell’s strengths as an actor, and it’s not hard to understand why you’d want him at the center of an apocalyptic satire. (We could argue that he’s already done the job once before in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even if he wasn’t present for the apocalypse in question.) This time around he’s surrounded by Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), Susan (Juno Temple), Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and Marie (Georgia Goodman). While everyone gets a moment here and there, it’s only Mark and Janet, Susan, and Ingrid who get backstory, and only the latter two who really get deeper character work to play with. It’s unfortunate, particularly where Peña and Beetz are concerned, because it feels like a bit of a waste of both their talents. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is pulling from a fair share of well-loved and riffed upon films, from zombie yarns, to ‘80s favorites like Ghostbusters and The Terminator and Short Circuit, to sci-fi classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (My personal favorite was a segment in the flashbacks that felt like it was pulled straight out of the Frank Oz remake of Stepford Wives, a very apt comparison in both commentary and tone.) There are a few places where those riffs are a little too blunt, or cribbing too much; the fact that the film is clearly hoping for (and has even received) comparisons to Everything Everywhere All at Once feels a little desperate in that category. A poppy, gonzo-style satire isn’t going to manage EEAO’s depth by its own definition. But when it allows itself to let loose and go wild with the premise it’s constructed, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a great time at the theater. Director Gore Verbinski has always had a knack for making comical scenarios seem effortless rather than contrived, and it allows the audience to buy into the premise wholly before things start getting really strange—or perhaps less strange than you think, as many of the more pointed jabs in the story highlight difficulties we’re having in the here and now, from the ethics of cloning to the commodification of our thoughts and experiences to endless gun violence to the effect of social media on both our attention spans and our willingness to push back against what we know is wrong. Sam Rockwell’s character says it from the start: The people who agreed to come on this journey with him are doing it because they’re aware that something is very wrong with the world they live in. And it ends on a thought that needs proliferation perhaps more than any other at this moment in time: that the future we’re staring down the barrel of isn’t inevitable. AI and no privacy and being sold to from the moment we wake each day. We can say no. We can build something better. We just might have to get real uncomfortable to do it.[end-mark] The post <i>Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die</i> Has a Unique Take on Time Loop Stories appeared first on Reactor.