'Bio Dome' Review: Was it really a career killer?

I wrote about Encino Man recently and noticed how much culture had shifted over the past few decades. That film featured Pauly Shore, who was once at the very height of MTV in its golden years, a Hollywood piece of gold that almost overnight turned into some common bronze. I've often read that Bio Dome was the very film that killed off his career, the true moment it was confirmed that his time was up and unlikely to return. The moment in which culture had yet again shifted, where Pauly Shore's family ties to the Comedy Store in Los Angeles couldn't revive his box office failures. Nor could it convince Hollywood to continue throwing him into films in hopes that people would stick around. The thing is, Shore had a specific 'thing'. A character. And naturally, people tend to consider them one-trick ponies which inevitably people grow tired of. Obviously Shore can't keep up the character to this day, there was a time and a place for it. It's no longer that time.

So how bad was Bio Dome? I have had this question for a while. It's rare that a single title can often kill off a career. Usually it's a gradual decline in interest that comes. Usually it's over-saturation as audiences want to see new characters and actors. I think of The Rock as a great example of this, where he himself has been considered box office poison for a long time, despite Hollywood's continued efforts to convince us otherwise, only for them to burn another hundred million dollars. It makes you think: at which point does that cultural shift take place? Can we pinpoint it based on the types of people that at one point are considered invincible and dominating the entertainment industry, only for their name to suddenly fade out of relevancy seemingly overnight? Perhaps that was the case here. Where audience fatigue had set in, and Shore was an unfortunate victim of cultural rejection and change.

After watching Bio Dome, I think there's a mixture of things that went wrong here. But also I feel some of that hate came a bit unwarranted. After all, it wasn't much later than a slew of even more terrible films with worse of attempts at comedy would appear; the wide range of mockery films of the earlier 2000s. The idiotic genre of comedy had a ton of terrible entries within it, but many managed to gain quite a cult following throughout the years, with tons of references and generally just less harsh words from critics. Dumb and Dumber found success, but was that perhaps because of Jim Carrey's luck? Now, none of this is to defend Bio Dome, it really is a hard watch. A film that takes its attempts at comedy to quite an obnoxious level. Where it needs to find its pacing and do something different but feels like the pacing never stops. It never gives itself a moment to really be normal. And that's where it gets tiresome, fast.

The story surrounds two total idiots that have girlfriends somehow, of which they love to spend their time trying to support good causes and the environment, whereas their boyfriends find stupid little lies to get out of joining them every time, only for their girlfriends to mock them and make them jealous with their own lie. This has the two driving through the wilderness only to find what they think is a mall, instead it's a bio dome which aims to put into practice a small year-long civilisation that tests how humans could live alongside nature. Something that would put research towards the concept of off-world colonies in which man must nurture an artificial landscape to maintain its support, leading to its own survival. The two idiots get stuck in it somehow, leading to them being used as a marketing tool rather than admitting on its opening (or closing) day that they already suffered contamination.

With its 1996 release, this is already the time in which Shore is on the way out. Where his Weasel character has already been a bit exhausted. This is where Shore is attempting as an actor to continue on the general idea, while still changing up his persona a bit. Particularly in the appearance. This is certainly a case of exhaustion. Where fatigue has set in. The story itself is something that holds some fruit to it. I could see the narrative holding promise, but with a more tamed set of protagonists. Not so in-your-face. But this really does reach into the territory of being insufferable, where it's hard to continue. And that's with a runtime of 90 minutes! While the film is full of other relatively big actors, and with 'career killing' types of films, it always brings the question of why it is mostly actors taking the fall for poor scripts, poor directing and generally just more risky releases. The world of cinema is a weird one.