The Bubble

There is a very specific type of madness that sets in when you’ve spent fourteen days staring at the same four walls and your only social interaction is a nurse digging for gold in your ethmoid bone with a six-inch Q-tip. In the spring of 2022, Judd Apatow decided to bottle that madness, carbonate it with Netflix’s bottomless budget, and spray it all over our screens. The result was The Bubble, a movie that attempts to satirize the absurdity of Hollywood ego under pressure, but ultimately becomes a victim of the very bloat it tries to mock.

I watched this while intermittently checking if my sourdough starter had finally died, and honestly, the sourdough had a more compelling character arc. It’s a strange artifact of a time we’ve collectively agreed to stop talking about, making it a "forgotten" film less than three years after its release.

The Cabin Fever Cinema

The setup is actually quite clever: the cast of a fading, multi-billion-dollar franchise called Cliff Beasts—think Jurassic Park but with more flying lizards and less dignity—is forced to sequester in a posh English estate to film the sixth installment. They are the first production back during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leading the pack is Karen Gillan as Carol Cobb, the "traitor" of the franchise who skipped the fifth movie to star in a disastrous indie called Jerusalem Rising (where she played a half-Palestinian, half-Israeli alien).

The meta-commentary on the "streaming era" is thick here. Karen Gillan captures that specific brand of insecure professional who is desperately trying to "rebrand" while being chased by a guy in a green spandex suit. Beside her, we have David Duchovny as the franchise lead and self-appointed "moral compass" who is constantly trying to rewrite the script to save the environment, despite flying in on a private jet. The cast is rounded out by Fred Armisen as Darren, an indie director who won a festival award for a movie shot on a Fitbit and is now drowning in a sea of CGI dinosaurs.

The problem is that the film mimics the pandemic experience too well: it feels roughly three years long. At 127 minutes, Apatow ignores the golden rule of comedy—leave them wanting more, not checking their watches.

A Comedy of Errors (and Egos)

Comedy is rhythm, and The Bubble is constantly tripping over its own feet. There are flashes of genuine brilliance, usually when the film leans into the sheer technical stupidity of modern blockbusters. The scenes where the actors have to "act" against nothing but green poles and tennis balls are genuinely funny, highlighting the disconnect between the "art" of acting and the reality of franchise filmmaking.

Fred Armisen is particularly good at playing the "visionary" who has no idea what he’s doing. His deadpan delivery of nonsensical directorial notes is a highlight. Then there’s Maria Bakalova, who plays a hotel clerk caught in a bizarre flirtation with one of the stars; she brings a weird, grounding energy to a movie that is otherwise untethered from reality.

However, the hit-to-miss ratio of the jokes is wider than a pterodactyl’s wingspan. For every sharp jab at TikTok culture—handled mostly by Iris Apatow as a Gen Z influencer cast solely for her followers—there are ten minutes of repetitive riffing that should have been left on the cutting room floor. Apatow’s signature style of "let the cameras roll and see what happens" works in Knocked Up, but here, it feels like a cast of very talented people desperately trying to entertain themselves because they weren’t allowed to leave the building.

The Artifact of the "Now"

What makes The Bubble an interesting curiosity for the contemporary viewer is its status as a "lockdown movie." We saw a few of these: Glass Onion used the pandemic as a backdrop, and Host used it for horror. But The Bubble tries to make the pandemic the punchline.

Released just as the world was opening back up, it suffered from "too soon" syndrome. Nobody wanted to watch a movie about nasal swabs and social distancing while they were finally allowed to go to a bar again. It’s a film designed for a different platform—Netflix—where the "theatrical experience" doesn't matter, which likely contributed to its sprawling, undisciplined length. Without the guardrails of a traditional studio edit, it’s a movie that feels like it was written in a group chat that should have been deleted.

The behind-the-scenes reality is almost more interesting than the film itself. The production actually mirrored the plot; they filmed at Cliveden House in the UK under strict protocols. The "Cliff Beasts" franchise is a thinly veiled parody of Jurassic World: Dominion, which famously struggled through its own "bubble" production. Turns out, the real-life frustration of being trapped in a luxury hotel doesn't always translate to comedic gold.

Ultimately, The Bubble is a fascinating failure. It captures the frantic, slightly manic energy of 2021, but it forgets to be a movie first and a time capsule second. David Duchovny and Karen Gillan do their best with the material, and the occasional sight gag involving a CGI dinosaur arm is worth a chuckle, but the film is too long, too loose, and too late. It’s a "forgotten curiosity" that earns its obscurity, reminding us that some memories—and some movies—are better left in quarantine.