A down and out loser, nurtured by internet conspiracy theories and fed a diet of wild raving, half-baked ideas, kidnaps a high-powered CEO because he is convinced that she is the Queen of an alien race come to enslave or destroy the earth, and holds her captive in his mom’s basement.
Here’s the spoiler: She IS an alien queen come to destroy the earth! And that’s the LEAST interesting part of the movie.
“Bugonia” is an exploration into how real-life “masters of the universe”—not space aliens, the ones who reside in the corner offices, fly on private jets, and pay less taxes than the lady who cleans the toilets–do enslave us, and wield powers that will, if not actually kill us, make our lives a captive living hell. The movie riffs on the theme of bees—Teddy is a beekeeper; Michelle (the alpha-queen CEO) also espouses an admiration for them. And well she should! They are the perfect metaphors for us, you and me, today. A tiny .000001% of billionaires lord vast powers over us (the worker drones, in this not so subtle analogy).
You don’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist, or live in your mom’s basement, to realize that to a large yet carefully made-invisible extent, we are subject to the whims and dictates of a ruling elite. Sure, we hold free elections–for candidates who are bought and paid for by that elite, because the cost of perpetually running for office is so high.
Why can’t we have election reform like in the UK, where costs are kept down because running for office is restricted to a scant six weeks before the election? Of course we can! All we have to do is get our representatives to vote for it. You know the same people who owe their allegiance, their fealty, and most of all their office and perks to the cabal writing the checks. Fat chance.
One billionaire bought one of the last free newspapers in America, his company publishes 86% of all books published on the planet, and sells us some huge percentage of all the crap we buy.
Another billionaire single-handedly controls access to space, sells a fleet of robot cars, and (in his spare time) reshapes our government to his choosing. A third owns most of the free housing stock left in America.
The story follows Teddy and Michelle in a series of escalating verbal exchanges. If what Michelle says sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it before, every time the corporate shills talk down to us as if we were recalcitrant children. (Think of the last conversation you had with the HR lady.)
“Let’s dialogue this.”
“I think you are following a false narrative.”
“You are living in an echo chamber.”
Speech designed to put you in your place, to make you doubt yourself.
As the movie events become more desperate, Michelle finally admits that, yes! She is an alien queen! And as it happens, we ARE conducting experiments on you, a failed ape-excuse for a species.
Teddy responds like the dog that finally catches the truck; he doesn’t know what to do, and things end badly for Teddy. For the rest of the human race as well, as the alien queen teleports up to her spaceship and sprays a galactic can of Raid on us, thus ending the experiment.
That is the ultimate message: they do control us, and can wield that power to wipe us out at their whim. Bleak, but refreshing in its honesty. Let’s enjoy it now, worker bees, before they use the Raid on us.
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