All it is doing is passing the Turing Test. A computer that passes the Turing Test is not thinking. All it can do is run programs that may be sophisticated enough for it to fool us by seeming to think. It is about the dilemma of artificial intelligence. Watching it again recently, I became aware of something more: "A. That is true enough on the principal level of the film, which tells David's story. I.' evades its responsibility to deal rigorously with this trait and goes for an ending that wants us to cry, but had me asking questions just when I should have been finding answers." "We are expert at projecting human emotions into non-human subjects, from animals to clouds to computer games," I wrote in 1991, "but the emotions reside only in our minds. All of the love contained in the film is possessed by humans, and I didn't properly reflected this in my original review of the film. In fact he does not love and does not feel love he simply reflects his coding.
Because he is a very sophisticated android indeed, there's a natural tendency for us to believe him on that level.
He exists to love her and be loved by her.
Once he is activated with a code, he fixes on the activator, in this case his Mommy ( Frances O'Connor). This reality works both for and against the film, at first by making David seem human and later by making him seem a very slow study.ĭavid has been programmed to love. Spielberg and Osment work together to create David with unblinking eyes and deep naïveté he seems a real little boy but lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. He is the most advanced "mecha" of the Cybertronics Corporation - so human that he can perhaps take the place of a couple's sick child. Osment's presence is a crucial element in the film other androids, including Gigolo Joe ( Jude Law) are made to look artificial with makeup and unmoving hair, but not David. As David, he cast Haley Joel Osment, who had scored a great success in " The Sixth Sense" (1999).
Once outside the dwelling - we don’t venture there much - the cityscape CGI can look rather cheap (being rough around the edges is becoming a Netflix movie trademark), and I would like to have seen what Jeunet would’ve done with a bigger budget and larger sound stages.He could. He adores peculiar-looking actors, like the extraordinarily intense Gill, and Nanty, whom fans will remember from “Amélie.” The home they all inhabit, bathed in piercing green and orange, is like “The Brady Bunch” house doused in nuclear sludge. “Big Bug” is smaller in scale than his “The City of Lost Children” or “A Very Long Engagement,” but grand on personality. He was, after all, being positioned by Hollywood to helm huge tentpoles for a while (his “Alien: Resurrection” flopped in 1997). “Big Bug” doesn’t have the epic swoosh of some of Jeunet’s previous films.
The evil Yonyx robots want to eradicate humanity. Françoise’s shtick with Greg is a hoot until it becomes haunting, when we realize that our demented society probably is moving in the direction of loving relationships with sex robots. There are some clever futuristic touches, such as a device that makes a room smell however you want (lawn trimmings! wet dog!) or a human-looking android whose mouth amusingly functions as a dust vacuum. All the while, the androids sweetly attempt to become more human. Their robots, led by the Stepford-wife-like Monique (Claude Perron), lock them inside to “protect” them from an incoming attack by the all-controlling Yonyx bots - they look like the Borg of “Star Trek” and act like the Terminator.Īs the captives devise their exodus, personalities - and occasionally bodies - clash. Alice’s (Elsa Zylberstein) home is bombarded by neighbors, acquaintances and her ex-husband. The crazy characters are Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), a single mother, and her bored son Léo (Helie Thonnat) her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his whiny young girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust) older neighbor Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), who is in love with her sex robot Greg (Alban Lenoir) a director (Stéphane De Groodt) who is trying to get in bed with Alice, and his politically active daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard). While “Big Bug” is characteristically eccentric, it also has the most mainstream appeal of any Jeunet film since “Amélie.”
Viewers have been devouring warped foreign takes on social ills and technology lately, like the Korean mega-hit series “Squid Game.” Here’s another. The strangeness of Jeunet that film buffs once had to seek out at arthouse cinemas feels right at home on the streaming platform.