In Bigbug, the Robot Uprising Will Be Exceedingly... Polite?

The director of Amélie heads to the future in this unsurprisingly quirky sci-fi comedy.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.
A bald android with piercing sky-blue eyes and a disconcerting smile addresses people on TV.
Screenshot: Netflix

French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has made some incredibly well-regarded films like Delicatessan, The City of Lost Children, and Amélie (and he also directed Alien: Resurrection, about which the less said the better), but it’s been nearly a decade since he last wrote and directed a movie. That will change this February, when Jeunet’s colorful, offbeat sci-fi comedy Bigbug about a robot uprising comes to Netflix.

Now, there are strangely—or perhaps appropriately—two different synopses for the film, and I’m going to give both to you:

1) “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.”

Advertisement

2) “Humans have ceded most tasks to AI in 2045, even in nostalgic Alice’s home. So when robots stage a coup, her androids protectively lock her doors.”

If you watch this trailer, it seems like some of the androids are staging a revolution, while the robots are trying to protect the bougie people inside Alice’s gaudy house. But maybe some of the robots have gone rogue as well? Look, here’s the trailer, make your own call:

I’m not sure it really matters which inorganic beings are doing the revolting, given that everything shown in this trailer is totally bizarre. Besides the really interesting and unique robot/android designs, there’s some bare bottom spanking, a Catwoman outfit, and I think I even saw a couple of aliens in there extremely briefly? And the color palette of the movie is just lovely; even if the plot ends up being incomprehensible, it might be worth watching for the visual artistry alone.

Advertisement

Bigbug stars Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Stéphane De Groodt, Dominque Pinon, Youssef Hadji, André Dussolier, Alban Lenoir, Claud Perron, and Claire Chust. It premieres on Netflix on February 11.


Wondering where our RSS feed went? You can pick the new up one here.