Badlands Story Hour Ep. 173: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Chris Paul and Burning Bright return from Gart to break down Gore Verbinski's 2025 dark sci fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, written by Matthew Robinson and starring Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple, Haley Lou Richardson, Michael Pena, and Zazie Beetz. The premise is delightfully strange. A man from the future shows up at a Los Angeles diner on his 117th attempt to recruit the exact right combination of patrons to stop a rogue AI from ending the world. The guys give Verbinski his flowers (Pirates of the Caribbean, Rango) and argue this film is far smarter than its modest box office suggested. The conversation drills into whether Rockwell is actually saving the world or trapped in his own dystopian power fantasy about a mother he could not protect. They tackle the AI's tagline ("it knows what you want") as basically the satanic argument against God, the World of Warcraft analog of people choosing the matrix because reality prime has gotten so bad, and Donald Trump's claim that real intelligence is the ability to predict the future. From there it goes wide: the great cloud in the sky as a reflection of us, Marvel introducing multiverse Hegelian inversions to normie audiences, the Iran war as a predictable plot you can map, and why thinking in story structure beats decoding military comms every time.