Critic Reviews

A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

While Bigbug is characteristically eccentric, it also has the most mainstream appeal of any Jeunet film since “Amélie.”

Subtlety has never been one of Jeunet’s tools, and the comedy in Bigbug is enjoyably over-the-top, occasionally a bit too mannered, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

There’s a lot going on in Bigbug, yet at the same time it can feel like there’s too little meat on the bone here, particularly when stretched about two hours. It is nice seeing the filmmaker back behind the camera; you also can’t help the wish his return after nearly a decade had been with something more substantial.

If only Jeunet had instilled his story and characters with a little more of that ingenuity, then Bigbug might have been a more substantial watch.

Bigbug’s garish and confusing world does linger in the mind after the credits roll, primarily because we’re only permitted to see a tiny slice of it. Trapped in the bottle, looking out, everything looks distorted and larger than life, but vaguely, scarily recognizable.

This movie has Jeunet doing “The Jetsons” while ruminating on what a robot uprising might inevitably look like, but that proves to be less exciting than one could ever imagine.

It’s impressive what Jeunet is able to pull off with a shoestring budget, but the ideas and characters underpinning his visual imagination leave a lot to be desired.

After a decade away, Jeunet has returned to embrace all of his worst eccentricities to create an absurd mess.