The Bubble REVIEW – Bursting Out of Existence –

Judd Apatow’s The Bubble aims to capture the feeling of what it was like to shoot a movie during a pandemic. While the premise intrigued me and the cast looked promising, as I began watching the film, I realised what a tremendous mistake I made thinking this might be good.

The Bubble starts with actress Carol Cobb (Karen Gillian), who’s approached by her agent to do the latest film in the franchise, Cliff Beasts 6. Carol’s previous movie Jerusalem Rising didn’t do so well, so going back to her role in Cliff Beasts might help restore some good will. So Carol leaves behind her clingy boyfriend Josh (Chris Witaske) and his two children, and heads to a hotel somewhere in England to prepare for shooting the film. To keep the movie set as covid free as possible, the actors have to quarantine for two weeks, which is a typical expectation when travelling during the pandemic.

All this is played out in a hyperbolic fashion, meant to poke fun at actors, especially since these bunch of actors are shooting a franchise film, something that doesn’t do much for a society going through a life-threatening situation. While I believe works of art are important to our existence and helps make life worth living, The Bubble isn’t a film that does that, mainly because it’s unfunny, scattered, and loses the plot about what exactly it’s trying to say.

In a comedy sketch, characters can possess a single character trait, and that’s enough to sustain the entire sketch. But this is supposed to be a movie, with proper character arcs and some semblance of a plot. Instead we get all these one-note characters, and the cast never really muster up any real chemistry with one another.

Carol is neurotic and has bad taste in men, Lauren (Leslie Mann) and Dustin (David Duchovny) are in an on-again-off-again relationship, Dieter (Pedro Pascal) wants sex, Sean’s (Keegan-Michael Key) obsessed with promoting his new book, and director Darren Eigen (Fred Amisen) went from a Sundance indie darling to this blockbuster film, so he needs these actors to put in the work because he doesn’t want to go back to his minimum wage job again. Oh and Krystal’s (Iris Apatow) gen z, so she’s really into tik-tok, though I will say the tik-tok moments in this film are probably the most entertaining parts of it.

It’s astonishing how director Judd Apatow, who’s also one of the writers on this film, could go from such a decent filmography to this catastrophe. Maybe he needed a project to occupy himself during the pandemic, but did we necessarily have to see it? Here’s the most important thing one needs to know about being an artist: there are some art pieces you create that don’t work, but then they help you get to something even better. This is the case for The Bubble, an idea that might have been good in theory but fails epically in execution. The problem is, because Apatow is a well-known director, and there are all these bankable names involved, this means the film was always going to have a market. I watched it precisely because I know all these people, and never have I regretted a decision more.

The only good thing to come out of this is Harry Trevaldwyn, who is the most consistently funny person here. Guz Khan adds some humour as well, but he disappears pretty early on in the movie, and the comedy disappears with him.

The Bubble has a runtime of just over two hours – that’s way too much time to spend on a movie that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say.

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