Bigbug movie review & film summary (2022)

The attentive viewer will have already deduced what the characters seem unwilling or unable to grasp: their imprisonment is related to technological developments occurring in the world at large. Early in the story, we get glimpses of a televised 'game show' in which humans are humiliated and hurt. The situations remind us of ways in which political prisoners, gladiators, and slaves have been mistreated throughout human history.

The tormentors are mass-produced, identical humanoid robots, all played by Jeunet veteran François Levantal. They appear to do the bidding of the AI hive-mind that rules at the highest level of robot tech. It's probably something akin to Skynet in the "Terminator" franchise, although this aspect, like everything else in the movie, is communicated in such a way that we get the gist of what we need to know without being drowned in exposition.

Jeunet is a filmmaker of what I like to call the "contraptionist" school, working in the vein of Robert Zemeckis, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, and animator Nick Park in the 1980s and '90s. He always blocks the actors elegantly in relation to each other and his precise, sometimes acrobatic camera movements. The characters' actions are choreographed to complement the movements of contraptions that swing into or out of the frame, rise up from the floor, zip down from the ceiling, and transform from their original shape into something else. There's even a futuristic Murphy bed made of shiny ribs of dark wood; it seems to shimmer out from a wall, dressing itself with blankets and pillows. Some of the gadgets could've appeared in "The Jetsons" or "Get Smart" or "Back to the Future, Part II," or in one those wonderful mid-century Jacques Tati farces like "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" or "Playtime" where every frame was abuzz with devices that the characters thought of as miracles of modern science, but that looked to us like absurd toys—or vulgar displays of wealth. 

There's something else going on here beyond virtuoso demonstrations of directing and production design. "Bigbug" is part of a tradition of science fiction movies that use robots and artificial intelligence to get us to think about what it means to be human. But the setup and follow-through is a little different here than in a lot of those movies, because the filmmakers suggest that the machines plotting to enslave or destroy us are just completing a coordinated, multi-generational campaign of self-willed obsolescence that humans dreamed up and implemented.  

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