'Covid Cinema,' if that's what it should be called, has used the pandemic to create movies with a distinct feel and tone. These films are generally made by people who love working together, enough so that they wouldn't terribly mind being stuck with each other for an extended period of time while a film set is on lock-down from the rest of the world. As such, these are often intimate, stage-like movies with smaller casts and crews and often inventive filming techniques.The Bubble marks off just about every box on the 'Covid Cinema' checklist, except for the 'inventive' part, but Judd Apatow has never been a specifically bold or distinct director. He tends to let the actors and the script do the heavy lifting, without any stylistic or cinematic interference, keeping his mise-en-scène fairly minimalist and with a workmanlike approach. Usually, his scripts and talent working with actors keeps everything afloat, and he creates great, very funny stuff in the process (Freaks and Geeks, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People).
Judd Apatow and The Bubble of Hollywood
Additionally, Apatow didn't just direct Funny People; he also knows a plethora of them. For 25 years, he's been writing for, directing, and hanging out with some of the most hilarious humans on the planet. So one would think that when Apatow gathers a talented cast (and a writer for South Park, Pam Brady) together in a luxurious mansion in England for two months, some kind of magic would happen.
At first, it almost seems to in this satirical take on Covid-era Hollywood (very) loosely based off the production of Jurassic World: Dominion (which finally wrapped post-production). After text informs us that Cliff Beasts is a huge action franchise and the sixth installment will be filming during the pandemic (in a weirdly handled, low-budget way), the opening scenes of the movie are funny and done well.
Karen Gillan plays an actor who stepped away from filming Cliff Beasts 5 in order to play a half-Israeli, half-Palestinian, all-politically-incorrect woman in a film called Jerusalem Rising that has a 4% on Rotten Tomatoes (The Bubble is not faring much better). Her agent convinces her to return to Cliff Beasts 6, meaning she'll have to leave her live-in boyfriend and his kids. She says her goodbyes to them on her iPad ("Daddy said you're abandoning us to die," the boy says) and heads to the United Kingdom.
Like a lot of Covid cinema, The Bubble is a bottle movie set in one location, so almost the entirety of the movie is set in a massive posh palace, filmed in Hedsor House and Cliveden House in Taplow. The producer on the film instructs some Covid safety officers how to handle actors, and it's a hilarious scene that demonstrates Apatow at his best, allowing some great acting and improvisation to play out while he encourages from the sidelines. Harry Trevaldwyn, a relative unknown, is absolutely phenomenal as one of the health officers, and provides some of the best moments through The Bubble, which sees Gillan reunite with her co-stars and begin production on Cliff Beasts 6.
The Bubble: Another All-Star Netflix Disaster
Unfortunately, The Bubble lacks the usually adept and intelligent character-based humor Apatow's scripts are known for. As mentioned, he also doesn't try anything special from the director's chair, which tends to work out just fine for his 'get out of the way and shoot' approach. This leaves the actors, who are mostly game to have a good time, but without a solid script and direction, they simply have little to work with.
They make for a strong cast, though. The Bubble may not have as impressive credits as another unfunny, all-star Netflix comedy that was an important failure, but it's filled with great actors nonetheless. Fred Armisen, Maria Bakalova, David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, Leslie Mann, Kate McKinnon, Pedro Pascal, Peter Serafinowicz, Rob Delaney, and the aforementioned Trevaldwyn and Gillan are all delightful actors, and the cameos from people like John Cena, Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy, John Lithgow, and Benedict Cumberbatch are very fun. However, what should have felt like a wonderful opportunity to just hang out with this great group and share some laughs with them turns into an overlong distraction that borders on the ridiculous.
As the production of Cliff Beasts 6: The Battle For Everest (which was teased as an actual movie by Netflix) drags on for months, the actors get restless. Unable to leave the hotel and threatened with massive financial fines for breaking contract, the actors ostensibly become hostages of the studio heads (who are all presented as endlessly delegating, blackmailing, horrendous lunatics). Sex, drugs, madness, and mutiny may all ensue, but hilarity does not.
The supposed Covid 'safety measures' taken by the producers are actually in order to keep the actors in check, a dangerous allegory that could send the wrong message about Covid and conspiracy theories. These safety protocols get increasingly ridiculous, as hands explode, laser surveillance is installed, people are frisked, and everyone is threatened and punished. This all leads to even sillier finale, in which the actors use their stunt training to try and escape the movie set once and for all.
The Bubble Doesn't Pop
There are many targets here, including Hollywood, the egos of actors, Covid panic, TikTok, and social media in general, but Apatow misses just about all of them. It's entirely possible to make great Covid cinema, whether using a low-budget horror approach entirely on Zoom as in Host, or creating a taut, Harold Pinter-esque home invasion thriller like Windfall. Even romantic comedies can work when Covid comes to cinemas. It's honestly incredibly surprising that The Bubble is so weak, but unfortunately not surprising that critics everywhere will have more fun coming up with insulting puns like 'The Bubble blows' than they did watching the film.
It's been interesting to see the Rotten Tomatoes score for The Bubble slowly go down since its Netflix release the morning of April 1st; it now stands at 22% but will likely decrease further. Part of the negative response may have been the high expectations around the film. The bottle movie approach seems absolutely perfect for Apatow, who prizes intimate, character-driven comedies that rely upon dialogue and actors more than anything a gigantic budget and pre-pandemic filmmaking could provide. What happened here is anyone's guess.
Perhaps Apatow and the actors simply had so much fun making the movie, that they developed blind spots as to how other people would actually view it. It must have been delightful, hanging out for a couple of months at a gorgeous palace, getting to improvise and play around with great actors. It was probably so delightful that Apatow assumed everyone would enjoy it as much as he did; in this case, his humor is more of a 'I guess you had to be there' joke.
In the ultimate twist of irony, a documentary about the filming of Cliff Beasts 6 becomes a smash hit and more popular than the failed fake movie itself. Like that fake documentary, the production of The Bubble was probably more interesting than the film itself, so an actual making-of documentary would probably be much funnier.
It's almost as if The Bubble is aware of this. One of the last lines of the film is, "Well at least we tried to make a movie. They can't judge us for that. We made something that's a distraction in these difficult times." Making a movie is an incredibly difficult feat, but unfortunately, they can and will judge you for that if it fails.