Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

Big Bug is a deceptively clever production in the age of Covid. Set somewhere in the latter half of the twenty-first century, it involves an android revolt, as well as android allies to humans, and still the entire film takes place in a single location—a futuristic, cookie-cutter home in which seven humans and their four robots are locked, by an overridden mechanized security system.

It didn’t even register to me how scaled down the production was until well into the film. There are brief cutaways to a few other actors, typically a news anchor relaying the news, first of a citywide “smart car” traffic jam, and then of adanced-AI humnoid soldier bots (called “Yonyx”) evidently taking over the world. A couple of actors do eventually appear as additions to the cast that exists inside this home, first a male pleasure model coming from an attack across the street; then a Yonyx model come to charge and convict the humans of supposedly terrorist crimes as they attempt to override the security system.

There are actually about eighteen credited cast members in Big Bug, but only ten of any notable significance. In addition to the seven humans in the house (the woman who owns it; her boyfriend and his teenage son; her adopted daughter; her ex-husband and her new girlfriend; and a neighbor lady), three of the robots are played in person by actors: the lady who basically exists as a house servant; the aforementioned pleasure model who later manages to get inside from a neighboring house; and the Yonyx military android.

Much of Big Bug is wildly uneven, but I found myself enjoying it a lot of the time in spite of its clear inferiority, particularly compared to previous works by its director and co-writer, long my personal favorite of international film directors: Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This is the man who gave us the eternally charming Amelie (2001) in addition to the earlier cult classics Delicatessen (1991) and City of the Lost Children (1995). He also made an ultimately failed bid to become successful in hollywood, with the flawed but delightfully weird Alien: Resurrection (1997) and A Very Long Engagement (2004). To me, he is somewhat like the French version of Tim Burton, with a career front loaded with timeless dark comedies and later output with diminishing returns. On average, Jeunet has been less disappointing in his later years, but that doesn’t make the more recent output better by a very wide margin.

The difference, I suppose, is that a movie like Big Bug manages to be fun and weirdly compelling even as its story beats fundamentally lack in originality. Watching this movie, I felt like I was seeing a zany blend of War of the Worlds’s plot twist and Mars Attacks!’s visual palette. The plot has very little new to offer, at least when examined closely. The rewards here are in the details, always the area where Jean-Pierre Jeunet excels. Big Bug is filled with a healthy sprinkling of genuinely funny sight gags; I found myself laughing a lot more than I could convince myself this movie really deserved. But who’s to say what it “deserves,” anyway? Is it not relevant just that it consistently got me to laugh?

It is a little on the nose at times. Once the Covid angle finally registered to me—probably later than it will for most viewers—I realized how many ways Jeunet made obvious gags of the current pandemic itself. It’s about a family forced to isolate together. There’s even a reference to “COVID-50” at one point. That’s not even to mention a title like Big Bug for a movie produced during a pandemic the likes of which has not seen in a century.

The very fact that this film was released as a Netflix movie last Friday is a clear byproduct of the current state of the film industry—a state hastened, again, by the pandemic. Three years ago, Big Bug would have been released in theaters, seen by few. Now, pandemic or not, it has the potential to reach a far greater viewership on a streamer. The overall quality of the film makes this feel appropriate anyway. The neon-bright visual effects might have impressed slightly more on the big screen, but not enough to make it worth the price and effort. On Netflix, all you have to do is press a button. When the stakes are this low, home viewing makes Big Bug just a bit of silly fun that’s not a total waste of time. I really didn’t like its belabored editing, with overuse of fade-outs at odd moments, and it could have benefitted hugely from shaving about twenty minutes off the run time. All of that notwithstanding, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s singular sensibility continues to speak to me, and I had a good time,

*You won’t miss too much if you sleep on this movie … but if you open your eyes to it, you might still have a little fun.*

Overall: B-