In its first five minutes, Bigbug already seems more eerily prescient than most of its genre relatives. It may look like Blade Runner or A. I: Artificial Intelligence, but as it's been made by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie; The City of Lost Children), it guarantees a playful, unpredictable, and unique take on the familiar concepts we're about to see. However, what truly struck me was the all-too-accurate particulars:
We've seen this idea before. Mankind at the mercy of machines. But the additional detail of half-naked people on (literal) leashes -- acting like domesticated animals for all screens to see -- makes it seem especially accurate. Just think of the digital age we're already in, and what some people willingly film themselves doing via their Twitch, TikTok, and OnlyFans channels. (The attention they garner is their reward and it also rewards the website, the algorithm, the machine...) When we first see the visual, it's admittedly a piece of in-universe entertainment, but it foreshadows things to come.
We move into the film's "real world" and things continue to seem clairvoyant, as a robotic maid serves up a nice batch of grilled crickets (an environmentally friendly and Greta Thunberg-approved delicacy, so I'm told) for her masters and their arriving guests. The movie is in French and so there's a pun here: Cricket is "grillon" (likely derived from the Latin "Gryllidea"), ergo they are eating "grillons grillé".
There's more. We learn that handshakes have been replaced with elbow nudges because of you-know-what and that drones and voice-controlled programs are being used for whatever drones and voice-controlled programs could possibly be used for. The further into Bigbug we get, it gets crazier -- yet more and more believable at the same time.
Some of those "jokes" seem dated now, sure, but as hopeful as things are starting to appear, I'm willing to guess we're only a few weeks away from a COVID variant -- brought forth because y'all just can't sit the f-ck still and leave the vacationing/clubbing alone for a while -- that "necessitates" a government anti-handshake mandate. Oh, did that sound disturbing? Why? Are you an anti-vaxxer?
Anyways. What's the actual plot about and why is this family in lockdown? Well, it's your basic uprising of machines -- that feared moment in our future where the devices and programs we've created to serve us finally turn on us (after backfiring in predictable ways, as with the self-controlled cars that go on strike when the plot gets started). Again, the idea itself is familiar, but Jeunet gives it his usual eccentric flair that sets it apart from any other movie on Netflix right now. His weird and expressive characters are as fun as ever, but I really missed those calculated chain-reaction sequences where one microscopic accident may cause a massive development.
As per usual, Jeunet's cast is nonetheless having a blast. Dominique Pinon is a given but I also recognized Elsa Zylberstein from 2008's I've Loved You So Long and Isabelle Nanty from Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. Leading the androids, or at least the "Yonix" types who already control much of the world's information and law enforcement, is François Levantal, host of the TV series Homo Ridiculus I mentioned earlier. His equal-parts hilarious and threatening performance is a highlight amongst highlights.
Claude Perron is equally wonderful as the maid, a largely humanoid robot who, like many 'bots of old, yearns to discover what truly makes one "human". One of the human characters, meanwhile, has a moment where they begin to seem more like a programmable piece of intelligence. This doesn't lead to much, but it's certainly true that, whereas machines are starting to seem more and more alive, many humans appear less free-thinking, or just less inclined to be "truly" alive -- mortal. I won't bore you with my own thoughts on that but let the record show that my favorite Black Mirror episode is the one where V. R. and W. B. E. Are used to effectively unlock The Afterlife.
As distinctive as Jeunet is, he clearly owes a lot to classic sci-fi (the universe of The City of Lost Children has been named a "steampunk" wonderland worthy of Jules Verne) and perhaps even more to Terry Gilliam. Bigbug, in particular, reminds one of 2013's The Zero Theorem, a film that effectively seems lost (I hardly need to tell you where the Orwell reference is). Due to some cheap-looking VFX and a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion, I'm unable to give this one of my higher ratings. That said, I think people's complaints are majorly unfounded.
Even if you ignore its wild imagination and energy, you shouldn't worry this is some basic "technology = bad" screed at the end of the day. Au contraire, technology is what we make it.
