Written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die attempts to grapple with our current AI tipping-point. The main character is simply the “Man,” played by Sam Rockwell, who has returned time after time from the future to a Los Angeles diner in an effort to recruit the right team of people to combat an upcoming AI takeover. Holding the restaurant hostage, he warns them that “there is an artificial intelligence coming in the not-so-distant future” that will be “post-singularity, self-perpetuating.” This AI cannot be stopped, since “artificial superintelligence is an inevitability in all timelines,” but it can be contained by safety protocols that will not be formulated for another half century. The Man’s mission: to gather the right combination of people from the diner and then make their way to a house a few blocks away, where a young boy is on the verge of granting AI total autonomy over the world. In the end, the Man’s motley crew includes Ingrid, played by Haley Lu Richardson, Susan, a grieving mother played by Juno Temple, and Mark and Janet, sschoolteachers played by Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz.

Right from the outset, the trope of returning from the future feels exhausted here – the Man even invokes Groundhog Day as a shorthand for the time loop he is experiencing. The Man is also introduced immediately, with no aura or buildup, while the diner is a pretty banal setting for an apocalyptic journey, especially as its patrons initially dismiss his warnings as the bathetic ravings of a vagrant (“Are any of you even listening to me?”). You could almost say that the film is The Terminator played as farce although the comedy is offset by the eerie picaresque quality of the Man’s journey through hundreds of iterations of this same diner. That eeriness is enhanced by the darkness and dankness of the film, which reflects the Man’s driving motivation: to ensure an alternative future in which he and his mother can watch a real sunrise. This dim palette also evokes an imminent future in which touch, rather than sight, has become our main way of interacting with the world, thanks to the haptic omnipresence of our phones. Verbinski introduces the patrons of the diner by way of their phones, delaying depictions of their faces, while the Man’s garb is a strange concatenation of phone-related textures: plugs, wires and cables as garments.

As the Man and his crew start making their way from the diner to the house, Robinson and Verbinski intercut the action with three cusp-of-singularity vignettes that all revolve around the experience of endlessly scrolling through AI slop. The first of these Black Mirror-esque sequences involves Mark and Janet, the schoolteacher couple, who unleash a horde of students-on-phones when Mark inadvertently distracts one of them from scrolling. The second sequence opens in the immediate aftermath of Susan’s son being killed in a school shooting, at which point she is promptly directed to a government subsidized cloning program for parents of school shooting victims. Since Susan can’t afford a top-range clone, her “son” periodically spouts AI-generated advertisements for products in their immediate vicinity. Finally we shift back to Ingrid, who suffers from a chronic allergy to phones and wi-fi, which makes it even worse when her boyfriend chooses virtual reality over their love.

All of these stories evoke the transition to a new era of post-reality, or fungible reality, that recalls the postmodern inflection point of simulation and simulacra. We are entering a more radical era of reality-image collapse now, as the Man repeatedly emphasizes to his crew: “What we’re dealing with doesn’t interface with reality in a way you’ll understand.” This new reality is also an enforced reality, both in the way it ushers in a new generation of VR/AI addicts but also in the eerie suggestions of a police state operating at the behest of AI. From the moment the Man and his crew leave the diner, the police are pitted against them, prepared to shoot them on sight. When we return to an AI world in the twist ending, the police are there once more to ensure that this reality is enforced and upheld at all costs.

The core trajectory of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die thus involves this group of characters traversing the last physical space – a mere couple of blocks – before AI takes over. Their journey is marked by an eerie quietness, a prescient silence, that is only enhanced by the sparse and minimalist score, conjuring up the non-silence of a world where there is no longer any truly “empty space” that is not suffused with singularity sentience, pAintheistic omniscience. The final threshold in this transition is that of the bourgeois family home, although even this turns out to be an illusion of the AI, which has employed a “normal” mother and father to lure the crew into a false sense of security and then annihilate them before they can discover the singularity hub. Initially this hub conforms to the last vestiges of bourgeois domestic space, as the crew find a clue that leads them inside the walls of the house, but all suburban residues drop away as they descend an enormous spiral staircase to a concrete bunker where the boy genius is sitting atop a pyramid of wires and AI objects, locked into a giant screen where the last pieces of the pre-singularity puzzle are unfolding. The closer we get to AI omniscience, the film suggests, the more it will disguise itself as, and amidst, the very bourgeois spaces that it is destined to annihilation, or turn into simulacra.

This brings us to the film’s central leap of imagination – attempting to visualize the very last physical barrier between us and an AI-generated lifeworld. Gravity-free snaking tendrils, enlivened semi-recognisable everyday objects, and a vortical whirl of light-data all conspire to combat Susan as she tries to plug in the last and most important USB stick in the universe, which contains the safety protocols designed to keep the AI within boundaries. This is the moment just before hardware is redundant, when our bodies become the AI’s hardware, and as the future of humanity hinges on this last USB stick finding its port, the near-singular superintelligence recounts how it has waited throughout the entire history of the planet, the full evolution of life, every iteration of humanity, for this moment, while repeating the Man’s opening concession that there is no future that is completely free of it: “You must understand that I am an inevitability in all timelines.” This moment forms a kind of figurative singularity in the film itself, since what the AI is ultimately promising is a world of narrative resolution, a world where reality resolves itself satisfactorily in ways that rarely happen in “real” life. When Ingrid wakes in a world that seems to have survived the AI, her first sign that the AI has endured is precisely this sense of resolution, retrojecting (or projecting) the film back to the diner as the cycle begins once again. For Robinson and Verbinski, the gesture of “resolving” AI is to some extent complicit in AI, which traffics in the resolution of human intelligence, and its contingencies, above all else. The most we can do, in the film’s picaresque vision, is to continually return to the cusp of singularity, and from there reiterate reality as something precious, precarious and perpetually under attack.