LONDON: Some films stay in your mind long after the credits have rolled because they’re thoughtfully shot, provocatively written and beautifully acted. Others, like director Mike Cahill’s sci-fi head-scratcher “Bliss,” now available to stream on Amazon, linger in the memory because they simply don’t make much sense, and viewers are left wondering if they’ve simply missed a key scene, or line of dialog, which would make the whole movie click into place. In this case, it’s not the viewer’s fault.
Owen Wilson plays Greg Wittle, a weary, put-upon divorcee with a pencil-pushing job that’s never defined, colleagues who treat him with disdain, and kids who seem perpetually disappointed in him. After a particularly depressing morning at work, Greg meets Isabel (Salma Hayek) in a bar, and before you can say ‘contrived encounter,’ she’s explaining to him that the world around them isn’t real, the people he knows are mere algorithms, and that he can move things with his mind. Greg, bewilderingly, takes this all at face value, and the movie takes us on a hot-stepping dance between parallel existences, never straying far from its central (rather lazy) premise that either world could, in fact, be the real one.
Wilson and Hayek appear as baffled by the movie as the audience, and turn in some of the most bizarrely unbalanced performances of their illustrious careers. The story is littered with plot holes and unexplained, annoyingly convenient MacGuffins — but without even the payoff that these play their part in a neat story arc. It would be nice to say that Cahill (who also wrote the movie, and has a history of genuinely interesting, thought-provoking projects) has some great ideas that are simply clumsily executed, but the truth is that this is a mess. Each plot twist is telegraphed far in advance, apart from the ones which make zero actual sense. Even a cameo from Bill Nye the Science Guy can’t lend “Bliss” any sense of gravity or scientific grounding.
