Bigbug
Starring Elsa Zylberstein, Stéphane De Groodt and François Levantal
Rated MA15+
3/5
Bigbug is a silly and sweet but overlong science fiction comedy by French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
In 2050, a computerised home and its robot housekeepers lock their owner Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) and her friends inside during an AI uprising.
The visuals have a vibrant retrofuturistic quality (the CGI is somewhat poor, but this adds to the charm). The human characters have enjoyable friction and sexual tension, but the robot housekeepers’ efforts to understand and protect them – through humour, philosophy and affection – form the film’s intriguing, endearing heart.
Claude Perron plays the earnest, glitching maid Monique with gusto, and François Levantal is genuinely intimidating as the stern, grinning face of the AI revolution (and his design evokes both Robocop and Yul Brynner’s gunslinger android in the 1973 Westworld film).
Unfortunately, Bigbug’s appeal is stretched thin; not everyone will tolerate nearly two hours of bickering suburbanites and will-they, won’t-they dynamics, nor the sitcommy vibe. The plot is also patchy: there is rarely a sense of danger beyond the AI’s embarrassing punishments, two divorced characters get back together in an undeveloped and unearned reunion, and the AI is defeated by two Deus Ex Machinas (resolutions that come out of nowhere), which stretches credibility even for a goofy comedy. I also can’t tell if the film is too randy – using a deactivated air conditioner to contrive the characters out of their clothes – or typically French.
Bigbug is a horny, corny and decently enjoyable sci-fi comedy available for streaming on Netflix, but I would recommend Jeunet’s Amelie, The City of Lost Children, the underrated Alien Resurrection and especially his pitch-black postapocalyptic comedy Delicatessen over this.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
