Bigbug

A very, very, very bad film. I'm giving that one star mainly for the beautifully kitschy art, which I would like to see in a better story. Yes, I expected it to be weird, I know J.P. Jeunet, but why couldn't it be entertainingly weird, cleverly weird, or ideally entertainingly and cleverly weird? Why on earth was it so boringly weird to watch? (26.02.2022)

The future is full of robots and they’ve just thought they'd make life a little harder for humanity. During the machine uprising, several people with a lot of unfinished business between them gather in a house, and what else are they supposed to do but talk about what they really think of each other? BigBug is a visually interesting, but shallow and boring sci-fi comedy that starts to run out of breath after half an hour. And the more you watch it, the more obvious it becomes that the director of Amélie has his best creative years long behind him. (22.02.2022)

He handled the transition from animation to live action, he handled the transition from studio films to outdoor, he handled the breakup with his co-creator, he handled the huge budgets, the transition to the American way of production, and the attacks of Harvey Weinstein. In the end, it was Netflix that beat him creatively. Jeunet claimed in 2019 that he had been unable to find an investor for his next project for several years, and that he had Netflix as a last resort. There was a strong sense of reluctance to work under this studio, and I'm quite interested to see what their meetings with each other might have looked like. This also reveals an interesting paradox, where it's common knowledge that Netflix will give money to absolutely anything, while at the same time having a minimum of visually distinctive works in its portfolio. Because what has Jeunet been so far more than a formalist for whom every object in a scene was as important as any character. BigBug, with its setting on the stage of a single-family home, might have raised hopes that it would follow the dystopian Delicatessen, but the very first scene, which feels so fake, awkward, and lazily staged, will at most confuse us by telling us that the film is definitely set in the same late-capitalist universe as Iannucci's Avenue 5. Sadly, without Jeunet's previous magical stylings, suddenly all the nonsense, hysterics, and stupidity of the characters just feels silly, forced, and fake, because this time there's just the characters and nothing around them. (18.03.2022)