Good Luck, Have Fun, Dont Die
I saw Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die a few weeks ago, and I have not read much about it. I thought I would take a moment to write my thoughts on it before I forget too much. If you didn’t quite understand what happened, maybe this will help you figure it out.
Spoiler alert, by the way. There’s not much point discussing this without spoiling it.
The Man from the Future (henceforth referred to as The Man) isn’t really from the future. I mean, he is from our future, sure. His mother has hidden him in the bunker as you see in the flashback, and he eluded entering the AI world for some unspecified amount of time.
At some point not shown in the movie, he loses a battle and is captured. The AI puts him into the Matrix-style simulated world. He resists. The AI wants him to accept his new reality of his own volition, like Big Brother does with Winston Smith in 1984.
But he is resistant, and somehow The Man and the AI end up making a deal. A challenge. The AI says he will give him an environment similar to what was around when The Boy first assembled the parts to cause the AI to become sentient, and if The Man can get there through obstacles, and prevent the boy from creating the AI, he will win. We’re not sure what that entails.
The obstacles include the homeless man, and then whatever the other characters think of outside the house. Which is why The Man asks them to be careful of what they think of, as they become prompts which the AI then creates. This refers to a scene in the finale of Ghostbusters (1984) when Gozer the Destroyer asks the Ghostbusters to think of what form he will take to destroy the city, and Ray accidentally thinks of the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.
Throughout the movie, The Man threatens to press a button that he claims is a bomb that will kill the entire party. He does this to force them to listen to his directives. The button The Man is threatening to press isn’t to detonate a bomb at all. Unbeknownst to the other members of the party, it’s a reset button to bring him back to the start of the game, a spawn point as the gamers call it. We aren’t told how many opportunities he will have to reset, but he claims to have already tried the game over a hundred times.
It’s not clear to me about the scenes where we are told the AI has been modeling people that have died, in order to make deadbots of them. Perhaps it’s to have convincing artificial versions of them it can use in the AI reality to better control the living humans. One reviewer mentioned in the Wikipedia article for the movie that there was too much expositional dialog, but this aspect isn’t something I thought was explained at all.
Like many enjoyable movies, it is a bit of a puzzle movie that leaves some parts open to interpretation. You are given some of the pieces and you have to put it together yourself. You will probably have fun watching this movie, and probably won’t die.