The COVID-19 pandemic affected the entertainment industry badly.
Most of the production in this industry was halted at the start of the pandemic, but some of the production was too costly to postpone as there was a lot of money in the play. For instance, the cast of Jurassic World Dominion acted in a protective bubble.
Director of popular comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Jude Apatow took inspiration from the incident and incorporated it into his latest comedy film for Netflix, The Bubble.
The film centres around a group of actors and actresses who acted in the Cliff Beasts franchise, a fictional film franchise that resembles the parody of the main inspiration Jurassic Park. Before starting the production of the sixth film, COVID-19 hit the world and halted the production.
However, as the executives are reluctant to lose money, executive producer Gavin supervises the cast and crew under draconian measures to prevent the virus outbreak inside production, often impacting their sanity in a bad way.
During the filming, the production gets halted by many unwanted incidents, some of which made the cast stuck in their rooms for quarantine.
Struggling with the frustration, the actors and actresses find ways to cope-sneaking out to party, preaching about toxic positivity, and last but not least, getting intoxicated by drugs.
Carol Cobb, the actress with an ebbing career after a disastrous film, plays an important role in the film. She serves as an eye for the audience to show her tumultuous relationship with her family, attempt to revive her failing career, bonding and conflicts with her cast, and last of all, her ability to unite the cast against the strict measures which were pushing them to the verge of insanity.
The Bubble is a fun movie that is good for a laugh but should not be taken seriously. Apatow proves his thinking out of the box ability by making a film about casts playing a movie, not the typical movie that starts with a specific plot.
After a long successful career making comedy genre films, he tried to portray the impact of the pandemic on the entertainment industry in a satirical way. Still, the ingenuity of this film does not make it successful, rather it got criticised negatively at the box office.
The film manages to give the audience some good laughs for a while but in many scenes, the jokes felt imposed that spoils the fun.
Apatow inserted many adult-themed jokes where some of them felt unnecessary to the audience. Even though the film has a star-studded cast like Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal and Keegan-Michael Key, the main plot is just too weak to be saved by their acting.
The Bubble disappoints the audience with a weak plot and overused jokes. The failure of this film should remind future filmmakers that only having a big budget and including a stellar cast won’t make a film successful.
All in all, the film is a waste of a unique concept.
