Film of the Week: Bliss

Maybe I didn’t watch this as well as I thought I did, but my ultimate opinion about this film is, I don’t get it. I do not understand what it is supposed to give me; whether it’s meant to provide me with a political stance about how the future is going to look like, or just a formal science fiction film; and I wasn’t entirely sure if I was meant to be confused about what was going on, or understood everything that was happening on screen. In fact, the most confusing part about this film is trying to figure out what the heck this film was meant to be.

Owen Wilson and Selma Hayek are big names, they’ve acted in some brilliant films; there’s nothing wrong with their performance in this film, it’s just the story seems to be all over the place, it was unclear what performance they were ultimately meant to be giving.

Again, maybe I wasn’t watching properly, but I certainly wasn’t distracted by something else, my attention was solely on the film - I just don’t get it. But I do understand something, and that’s the plot - sort of. Salma Hayak’s character, Isabel, has created a simulation program in which lies a grittier world than the real world, and she gained the trust of several people to try it out and live inside that world. Owen Wilson’s character, Greg, has forgotten that he’s living inside a simulation until he meets up with Isabel and gives him some magical drug that allows him to control aspects of that world. He struggles to trust Isabel until she proves they were living in a simulation and brings him to the real world where he has even forgotten about his past. Whilst living in the real world for a short period of time, he realises something but doesn’t want to go back until they’re under duress from the Police and suddenly changes his mind in order to save Isabel. He then lives on in the simulation.... It seems that I may have understood a lot about the film, but that’s just the basic synopsis, I understood nothing else. What did he realise? Why doesn’t he want to go back and why did he suddenly change his mind? But, hey, it was nice to Bill Nye.

It’s supposed to be a mind-bending love story, and apparently they were already married before entering the simulation… I dunno, to be perfectly honest. Maybe there was something I missed during my first watch to fully understand what the film was trying to give me, but it left me so confused about what the film was meant to be that I’m not really in any rush for a second viewing. It wasn’t necessarily thought-provoking, statement-making, nor politically-satirical; it was just… well, the viewing experience wasn’t entirely bliss, it was just science-fiction. And that it did very little to give us any chance to believe any of it. Sure it explained a few details here and there, but not enough for me to say, “now that’s something that could happen in our world.”

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)