So by 2045, we have flying cars, huh? Well, I gotta last at least until then, cuz I’m not missing out on flying cars. Even if there’s a robot takeover and my live-in robot maidservant resembles Lisa Kudrow on crack, I still want the flying cars.
I like the details. Future societies frequently ignore the details. Imagine having a brilliant crab-like robot so intelligent you have to ask him to “dial it down” to speak to you … but you left it in a drawer and forgot about it because it serves no essential purpose. The robot’s name? Einstein (voice of André Dussollier). Oh yeah, that’s the future I’m talking about … where our robot overlords don’t terminate so much as dominate. Well, sure, they terminate a little, too, I suppose.
Dystopia has never seemed so … whimsical. Future entertainment mostly boils down to some sort of “Squid Game” type TV show where real live humans degrade themselves at the hands of the set of overlord bots named Yonyx (François Levantal). In the reality of this movie, however, real live humans degrade themselves both with and without the aid of overlord bots.
In this French Big Brother look at the future, a collection of idiots is stuck in a small house because their robots won’t let them leave. Some sort of critical mass threshold of civil unrest has been breached and so the bots know exactly what to do: lock the humans in. Then, of course, when the trapped humans are angered, the bots feel bad (because …why?), so the bots take impromptu lessons on becoming human. Inanity, thy name is Jacques.
The humans include
a divorced couple, their child, his new fiancé, her would-be squeeze, son-of-squeeze, a neighbor, and the neighbor’s sexbot. The humans are all distinct but seem like a collection rather than a set of individuals. The beauty of this picture is all in the androids. The crab-like Einstein, the mad-eyed over-officious maidbot Monique (Claude Perron), the toy bot, the vacuum bot, the sex bot all in conspiracy to keep the humans “safe.”
BigBug – which is also French for BigBug, apparently—is a goofy, unserious look at a potentially serious future. It’s like Soylent Green, but with cool knickknacks and amiable terminators. Despite the fact that Dominique Pinon always shows up in his films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet will always get the benefit of the doubt from me. His films consistently strike a unique chord of silly and serious combined. BigBug is both in spades. I didn’t love BigBug and I don’t think the film had anything particularly insightful to say about the future of automated fascism, but I sure didn’t want to give up on it, either.
A French future written beneath the stars
With enforcement by robotic avatars
That type A Terminator
I’ll deal with him later
So long as there are no more Le Cars
Rated TV-MA, 111 Minutes
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writer: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillaume Laurant
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Embracers of weird
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The rest
