Convenience based automation, capitalist focused mechanization, and A.I. innovation has endured as the classic death knell for humanity in speculative science fiction for a reason. In our present world of billion dollar corporations attempting to digitize all aspects of existence into a “metaverse” resembling a budget Playstation game, the prospect of technology’s rapid advancement and how it impacts our day-to-day lives in terms of labor and agency provides fruitful ground for justifiably cynical sci-fi authors to get their “told ya so”’s off their chest. This same moralizing cynicism of our present overreliance on technology and how it reflects on our sense of humanity permeates Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest quirky exercise Bigbug, a satirical peer into a kitschy future dystopia that’s broad comedic brushstrokes render it more ornamental than potent as a satire.
Set in the rapidly approaching year of 2045, the ceding of all minor tasks and inconveniences to artificial intelligence has gradually allowed a megacorporation known as Yonyx to take control while humanity remained ignorant and passive. Suburbanites live in a hyper-capitalist and overzealously bureaucratic hellscape wherein robotic servants rapidly enforce our obsolescence, our robotic overlords beam grotesque reality television and anti-human propaganda into their homes without their consent, and advertising drones hover outside your home 24 hours a day. Jeunet and co-writer Guillaume Laurant lay these techno-dystopian elements on thick for the sake of a pointed absurdity, but the messy confluence of ideas leaves the overall vision of this potential future unintelligible, and the satirical skewering is decidedly muted in its effectiveness. More often than not, Bigbug’s on-the-nose boldness with its speculative vision, such as the aforementioned gag reality show “Homo Ridiculous” which gets heavily repeated, elicits eye-rolls rather than laughs.
Placed within this possible future is a tale of suburban entrapment during an apocalyptic robotic uprising wherein divorcee Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), her new romantic partner/failing artist Max (Stéphane De Groodt), her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his secretary/fiancee Jennifer (Claire Chust) find themselves forcibly confined in Alice’s techno-enhanced suburban homestead at the behest of robotic maid Monique (Claude Perron) and the various robotic devices that populate their house. While a violent insurrection goes on beyond the sanctity of their home, the various household devices conspire to keep the captive families safe while goofily working to convince them they are on the same side. With personal tensions already running high amongst the group who, Jeunet and Laurant interject a quirky running motif of sexual tension — among the humans and the robots — which provide some of the most effective bits of comedy and insightful commentary on man-machine relations for a film that narratively feels like it is spinning its wheels in place. I do take it as a bad sign for the bottled plot when the film employs numerous — for lack of a better word — cutaway gags wherein characters recall a silly detail of their outlandish future and pull up a video screen to pause the film and show it in drawn-out detail.
Being a Jeunet film, a certain degree of quirky, twee absurdity was to be expected given the French director’s recent output; but much like with his conceptual future, Bigbug lays these formal qualities on with a hefty hand. The film’s set design and color palette channel a gaudy, early 2000s pop aesthetic for what feels like its own sake, and Thomas Hardmeier’s offbeat cinematography — heavy on slants and close-ups just begging to go full fisheye — overwhelm with their concentrated zane. Along with the wide-swinging elements of its sci-fi speculation, visually the film goes purposefully overboard for the sake of absurdity while notably stopping short of hitting any point of substance. Although credit where it is due: the film’s robot design work and their clever mixture of practical and CGI effects for their presentation are imaginatively realized and put the director’s noted peculiar sensibilities and exaggerated register to good use.
Between its outlandish satirizing of our potential techno-heavy future and its weaponized, often misplaced quirk, Bigbug ultimately comes across as an exhaustive exercise in low hanging fruit comedy. Where its stellar cast feels admirably tuned into the inanity and commits to Jeunet’s unsubtle surrealism, the film’s many musings concerning our machine-influenced existence and what that says about the sanctity of our humanity and freedom rarely, if ever, pad out to any salient end. Bigbug, for all its ambitious worldbuilding, winds up being a vibrant, strange, and provocative, but ultimately hollow, game of “what if.”
