Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die’s Cliffhanger Ending Was Intentional

Are we already on the verge of an AI apocalypse? That’s what you could easily glean from Gore Verbinski’s first movie in 10 years, the sci-fi action comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. The movie follows Sam Rockwell’s time traveler, who takes the customers of a Los Angeles diner hostage, recruiting a select group to help him avert the AI apocalypse. It’s not the first time he’s done this and failed. Again. And again.

It feels like a far-fetched premise — after all, time travel and humanity-destroying robots are still things of science fiction. But the world that we’re introduced to in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t feel that different from our own. Everyone is glued to their phones, swiping from one mindless 30-second video to another. Teenagers eagerly buy new products advertised to them en masse. And there’s an odd, glowing image that appears on each phone that seems to brainwash all high school students — okay, that one is a bit far-fetched. But it was important to Verbinski that his film shows just how close we are to experiencing the beginnings of the AI apocalypse.

“We are already growing ears on the backs of rats, right?” Verbinski tells Inverse. “If you don't think that AI is going to play with meat, I think you're being very foolish. I think the world's about to get very, very strange.”

But just as strange as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s world? Probably not quite, but it’s worth unpacking the bizarre twists of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and whether the revolution against AI is successful.

Warning! Spoilers ahead for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Ending Explained

The Man From the Future (Rockwell) has made it further than he ever has before. This group of people that he’s recruited — which includes grieving parent Susan (Juno Temple), schoolteachers Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña), Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and mysterious bleach-blonde drifter Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) — seem to have been the secret sauce to reaching the end-point of his mission. They’re holed up in an empty house across the street from the suburban home of the young boy who will invent a homicidal sentient AI that destroys humankind, awaiting...something.

It’s usually at this point that the group gets attacked, The Man From the Future explains. Sometimes it’s hired assassins, sometimes it’s a pack of rabid dogs. “What if it was puppies?” Susan asks. “Or a kitty!” someone else suggests. But it’s none of those things; instead, the group is set upon by an army of brainwashed teens, controlled by that mysterious glowing image on their phones. It’s Janet and Mark who have the unlikely solution: a toy blaster that their coworker rigged up that has a strange power to shut down all electronics. They head off the attacking army of teens, while the Man From The Future, Ingrid, and Susan (Scott is lost to the crowd) run to the home. But they cannot outrun the zombie teen army, and are surrounded — just when a giant AI cat made up of puppies arrives and starts devouring random teens. It’s a moment that tests the limits of even the movie’s reality — but Verbinski was coy on whether or not the group had already been trapped inside an AI simulation at this point.

“There's a lot in the movie you can go back and watch a second and third time. I mean, there's numerology, there's game logic, there's a lot of hidden things. I mean, you could ask the question, what's a simulation and what's a timeline?” Verbinski says.

Because that’s the big question once The Man From The Future, Ingrid, and Susan find the Boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), sitting on a giant mound of wires and computers. They realize that all the strange things they’ve been witnessing — from the teenagers brainwashed by their phones, to the hired hitmen — were all doings of the AI, which had already grown sentient and was now controlling the Boy (himself a clone) to upgrade itself.

But they have a few aces up their sleeves: The Man From the Future still has the USB that contains code to control the AI, and Susan has the help of a technology with the voice of her dead son, which promises that it wants to help them. While Ingrid had to leave the room because of her painful allergy to Wi-Fi, the pair try to plug in the code, only to be attacked by various wires and cords controlled by the AI.

It’s only when Ingrid, sporting a bloody nose, steps in to plug in the code that the AI reveals itself to her, and reveals her connection to the Man From The Future; transporting her to a simulation, it reveals that Ingrid is pregnant with the Man From The Future, and that she can avert his tragic life by escaping into virtual reality like her deadbeat boyfriend did. But Ingrid ignores the AI’s warnings and plugs in the code. The day is saved, and the trio are greeted by a still-alive Janet and Mark, and happy, un-brainwashed teens. But everything’s a little too perfect, and, seized by a feeling of dread, The Man From The Future apologizes to Ingrid and time-travels to the past once again. That’s when Ingrid — clued in by the return of her boyfriend and the giant AI cat — realizes that she’s stuck in the simulation.

We cut back to Norm’s Diner, where everyone is back to how they were the night before, scrolling their phones and eating pie. But this time, The Man From The Future walks right to Ingrid, steals her fries, and tells her his new plan: they will give everyone in the world her Wi-Fi allergy. Ingrid is baffled and indignant at this stranger approaching her, but as he rambles on, she cracks a smile. It’s a bit of a cliffhanger ending, but one that Verbinski hopes will spark something in the audience.

“There's still more work to be done,” Verbinski says. “Go to the movie, go to Norm's, have some pie, have some conversation, join the revolution. It's not over. There's still tasks. And I think it's nice to think about her disease as the cure. Implementing that, I think, will be challenging, but the forced abstinence is an interesting idea.”

So, can the world be saved from AI? If we can all develop an allergy to Wi-Fi, maybe.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is playing in theaters now.