Fellow City of Lost Children fiends, our time is now. After a long break from feature films, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has returned to the scene with Bigbug, which debuts on Netflix next month. And if the trailer is anything to go by, it’s delightful and weird and extremely French and about not just a robot uprising, but also sex robots. So it’s very Jeuenet. I can’t wait.
For those less obsessed, Jeunet is best known for one of two things: directing the beloved Amelie and being incorrectly believed to have ruined an Alien movie. His Alien: Resurrection was very unfairly and incorrectly panned, though to be fair, Jeunet is at his best when he’s working with his own original stories, whether the dark dreamworld of City of Lost Children or the madcap hijinks of Micmacs.
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Bigbug looks to be a little bit of the former and a whole lot of the latter. The summary is brief: “A group of bickering suburbanites find themselves stuck together when an android uprising causes their well intentioned household robots to lock them in for their own safety.” Those household robots include one described as “just a high-tech dildo,” while the rebellious androids have a Robocop-goes-to-Dark-City vibe and the design of the suburbs nods back to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle.
Jeunet wrote Bigbug with his frequent collaborator Guillaume Laurant, and Dominique Pinon, who appears in almost all the director’s films, is among the cast. In 2019, Jeunet told IndieWire, “I have a story I want to make as a movie about artificial intelligence, but it’s difficult to find the money because it’s a comedy with robots. So maybe it’ll be for Netflix, who knows. As a last resort, I will try Netflix.”
Whether it was a last resort or not, Bigbug arrives on Netflix on February 11th.
