"Kimi" and "Bigbug"

Let's catch up on some Netflix.

Steven Soderbergh's latest is a thriller about an agoraphobic tech worker living in Seattle during the pandemic.  It's mostly an updated "Rear Window," with some elements of "The Conversation," and "Run Lola Run," in the mix.  Our heroine, Angela, is played by Zoe Kravitz, and is the recovering victim of a sexual assualt.  She works from home, resolving errors from the Siri-like personal assistant devices, called Kimi.  One day she hears what appears to be a sexual assault recorded from one of the Kimi units, which forces Angela to dig into her shady employers, and eventually gather up her courage to leave her apartment to get help.  The last third of the film goes from techno thriller to out-and-out action thriller, with Kravitz as our capable heroine.  

While "Kimi" is a fun watch, I wasn't able to buy into it as much as I would have liked because it's so derivative.  Everything in this film is something that feels like a variation of something that I've already seen, from the montage sequences of Angela manipulating the recording with different equipment to get a clearer sound, to the chase scenes around Seattle with Angela sporting bright blue hair like a cyberpunk character.  The script by David Koepp is pretty good, with some smart observations about the current state of surveillance technology and privacy concerns.  The bad guys are downright casual in their infiltration of Angela's devices and data, and it almost feels like a subversion that the Kimi device turns out to be much more helpful to Angela than the scary corporation that controls it.  

I feel like part of the problem is that "Kimi" is designed to be very timely.  Soderbergh shot it on location in Seattle, the pandemic is clearly still in full swing, and Angela at one point chides an overseas colleague that #Metoo has happened, and he can't be hitting on her during work calls anymore.  The movie could become very dated very quickly.  On the other hand, Soderbergh isn't cutting any corners, making Kimi's apartment feel like a very dynamic space, and then using handheld cameras and over-bright lighting to shatter her equilibrium when she finally manages to leave it. Kravitz's performance is very good, highlighting Angela's resourcefulness, anxiety, and badass bona fides.  It's not a great Soderbergh film, but it's the best version of this movie that could probably exist in 2022.     

Now, on to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Bigbug."  This is Jeunet's first feature film in nearly a decade, and I honestly have to wonder if he forgot how to make movies during that gap.  I might just be completely misunderstanding the tone of what this movie is supposed to be, but I don't think that's the case.  "Bigbug" is a dark satire about our reliance on technology, taking place in a garish future full of flying cars, bad reality television, and robot helpers.  Because there's an evil A.I. uprising taking place, a suburban family and their guests are trapped in their home by their well-meaning household bots.  

  

This is a complete mess tonally.  The human characters, including frumpy Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), her boyfriend Max (Stéphane De Groodt), ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi), his girlfriend (Claire Chust), a neighbor (Isabelle Nanty) and teenagers (Marysole Fertard and Hélie Thonnat) are all unsympathetic caricatures.  The cartoonish robots and AI enhanced gadgets they clash with are half-baked and outdated, only menacing for how badly they straddle the line between human and inhuman behavior.  I imagine there has to be some French cultural subtleties that I'm missing here, some nuances in the humor or the satire that just isn't registering.  Otherwise, this is just clownish farce of the worst kind.

This would be easier to dismiss if it weren't for the resources that Jeunet had at his disposal.  Netflix's deep pockets allow him to make more of a spectacle of "Bigbug" than he's had the opportunity to do for some time.  So, it's not just that the movie is bad, but it's an obnoxiously bad eyesore that makes Jeunet's deficiencies so much more obvious.  All the charm of his handmade oddities and cluttered fantasy worlds has been supplanted by CGI horrors.  His characters have never been flatter or more disposable.  

And yes, Dominique Pinon does show up for a cameo.  

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