Film review: 'Bliss' wonders "what if the red pill was crack?"
The obtuse sci-fi drama 'Bliss' (streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting Feb. 5) is proof that most screenwriters should just stop crapping out malformed stories with simulation theory as a selling point.
In short: Recently divorced father Greg (Owen Wilson) is abruptly fired when he meets a mysterious Isabel (Salma Hayek) - and he begins to believe he is living in a computer simulation.
Writer-director Mike Cahill has made a career out of taking "deep thoughts" and turning them into scripts. 'Another Earth' grappled with parallel existences and 'I Origins' pondered reincarnation. But 'Bliss' is an insultingly shallow examination of crippling inequality and a utopia founded in a universal basic income and automation. The script has an ignorant reverence for these subjects - knowing just enough to gloss over these concepts with the broadest of brushes, but without any depth or dimension. It's like listening to a stoned college undergrad combine ideas scraped from ‘The Matrix’ with a liberal economist's tenuous grasp on post-scarcity economics.
Greg loses his job and becomes a drug addict. Strip away all the simulation theory nonsense and all that's left is a cautionary tale about escaping the bleakness of the real world by way of smoking rocks. 'Bliss' mashes up the "whoa man" aspects of "how do we know what reality is" with a man's life utterly collapsing around him. It honestly wouldn't be that surprising if the inspiration for 'Bliss' came out of Cahill watching a mentally unwell person screaming about "how nothing is real" - and Cahill's lightbulb moment was "wait - what if he's the one that sees the truth and everyone else is blinded by a lie? … Whoa."
But 'Bliss' hides behind vaguely outlined notions of financial insecurity, a slowly decaying "ugly" reality, a possible utopia founded on automation and metaphysical abstracts about the nature of reality ... to paint the portrait of a man escaping reality ... by smoking "crystals" ... in a homeless encampment. These are totally worthwhile ideas to explore in film - but 'Bliss' is too stupid to tackle these concepts.
Final verdict: Simulation theory is reduced to its stupidest fundamental aspects in this half-baked addiction parable. 'Rick and Morty' did a more for simulation theory in less than 3 minutes than 'Bliss' does in 103 minutes.
Score: 1.5/5
'Bliss' streams on Amazon Prime Video starting Feb. 5. This science fiction romance is rated R for drug content, language, some sexual material and violence and has a running time of 103 minutes.
Directed by Mike Cahill / Screenplay by Mike Cahill / Score by Will Bates / Cinematography by Markus Förderer / Editing by Troy Takaki / Starring Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek.
