In the 1984 sci-fi blockbuster The Terminator, a cyborg assassin is sent back in time by a human-hostile artificial intelligence system called “Skynet.” The assassin’s mission is to kill a woman before she can conceive and give birth to the future leader of a resistance movement against Skynet. The assassination is thwarted by another time traveler who turns out to be the future freedom fighter’s father.

The storyline of director Gore Verbinski’s 2025 release Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die shares some superficial similarities with Terminator—a man from the future again travels back in time to prevent a rogue artificial superintelligence from destroying humanity—but this is sci-fi comedy. (Verbinski is best known for directing the first three slapstick Pirates of the Caribbean action-comedies.) The protagonist, played by Sam Rockwell, wants to assemble a team to install safety protocols before an AI (being built by a nine-year-old boy, no less) can gain sentience. In another echo of Terminator, one of the members of the motley crew enlisted in the mission is the freedom-minded time traveler’s own future mother.

Notwithstanding its comedic wrapping, this is a movie with serious warnings—about AI, about the mind control delivered through mobile phones and virtual reality, and about the zombie-like behavior that many of us have observed in the real world in the screen-addicted. One reviewer comments that the movie “holds up a mirror to the ways we’ve voluntarily outsourced societal functions to technology because dealing with real issues would require effort, empathy, and other things we’ve collectively misplaced.” Our warning: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die may leave you with an uncomfortable feeling about your relationship with your phone.