Netflix’s strange sci-fi story Bigbug turns a robot uprising into French farce

polygon.com:

Sometimes, the best way to depict huge, earth-shattering events is to severely restrict the point of view. It’s cheaper to make a Shaun of the Dead than a World War Z, but narrowing the focus also recasts high-concept problems on a human scale, with human stakes. What filmmakers lose in spectacle by keeping the story small, they make up for in drama. Maybe that’s why Netflix’s Bigbug, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sci-fi comedy about a robot uprising, never leaves the confines of one suburban house. (Or maybe it was just a cheap way to make a film, especially during a pandemic.) Bigbug’s characters aren’t trying to overthrow their robot overlords. They’re just trying to get outside.

Bigbug is something of a comeback for Jeunet — his first feature film since 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. Jeunet is best known for Amélie, a sugar-sweet romantic fantasy that charmed the world in 2001. But in the ’90s, with collaborator Marc Caro, he trained his whimsical eye and wide-angle lenses on more grotesque subjects, for the bizarre Alien Resurrection and the dark fairytale The City of Lost Children.

Before those, he earned cult acclaim for Delicatessen, a Rube Goldberg contraption of a movie exploring a sort of retro post-apocalypse through the inhabitants of a single, crumbling apartment block. Delicatessen staged the intricate, near-wordless slapstick of Jacques Tati in a messy Terry Gilliam fantasy world, and Jeunet’s camera dissected the spaces of the apartment building like a leering, untidy version of Wes Anderson. (Delicatessen is streaming on the Criterion Channel, and it’s well worth catching.)

With its confined location, antic ensemble cast, and dystopian vibes, Bigbug is the closest Jeunet has come in 30 years