SAM ROCKWELL IS NOT AT SUNDANCE: THE 'GOOD LUCK HAVE FUN DON'T DIE' FILM PREMIERE

Directed by Gore Verbinski

We didn’t intend to be on our phones 24/7. It started innocently. Morning phone. Just checking for messages. A quick scroll. A light doom. Now we live in a still-decentralized New World Order where parents might still save humanity with stricter tablet rules, and where Sam Altman, after some media training and a champagne thin wafer dose of honesty, could admit it's up to humanity to write the rules.

In Good Night Have Fun Don’t Die, the New World Order has been overtaken by multi-dimensional machines, and there is exactly one person left coding the consciousness of a supreme being that may—or may not—save us. Sam Rockwell’s Man From the Future leads the mission at ground zero: a diner and we enter that world through a spicy Cholula sauce and a hand-picked group of citizen warriors who absolutely did not wake up expecting to participate in the fate of reality.

Structurally, the film plays more like Pulp Fiction, looping back to show how each character ended up at the diner—one very human detour at a time. Asim Chaudhry is a five-star Uber driver. Juno Temple is a mom reeling from an unthinkable family loss. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz are teachers who escaped a horrific school event. Hayley Lu Richardson’s princess character is nursing a recent heartbreak that feels world-ending in the way only heartbreak can.

We are pulled in through these funny, painful, awkward, sincere backstories—before they’re swept into something much bigger and much stranger. This is not wall-to-wall machines or a 2001: A Space Odysseysituation. The vibe lands somewhere between Back To The Future, What We Do In The Shadows, and 48 Hours—though I may be saying the latter because Griffin Dunne was at the premiere. The misadventures are the red herring. This is not another dystopian techno-story.

 While the film is pointedly asking us to wake up to the dangers of AI, there is also another side to AI that isn't seen on screen. AI already helps us—in medicine, creativity, accessibility, and problem-solving—and we know this. What we need is agency over how it’s used. The frontier labs are starting to understand that their role isn’t just to build the future, but to educate us on how to live inside it responsibly. They’re not going to be able to set the rules the way the FAANG-era companies did. We’re not letting that happen again. Good Night Have Fun Don’t Die isn’t arguing against technology. It’s arguing for humanity. It’s smart, dystopian, funny, and surprisingly tender.

A comic adventure crafted with both mainstream appeal and cult DNA and a killer score composed by Geoff Zanelli. The kind of movie that will spawn many Reddit communities, TikTok memes, and old-fashioned human emotional attachments long after we’re all gone—or uploaded.

Save humanity. Go see it. In theaters February 13. Trailer here.