‘Billionaire’s Bunker’ Review: A Formulaic Cocktail of Familiar Dystopias (Netflix)
In a luxury bunker designed to withstand any imaginable disaster, a group of billionaires is forced to coexist under the threat of an unprecedented global conflict. The new series from the creators of «Money Heist» premieres on September 19.
The format of Billionaire’s Bunker feels like a combination of formulas already tested and proven successful by Netflix. There’s a bit of Squid Game, a touch of The Platform, a hefty dose of Black Mirror and, of course, a lot of Money Heist, the show that cemented its creators’ reputation. The ingredients are familiar: a futuristic, tech-heavy premise; a class struggle unfolding in a confined space; a bleak outlook on humanity’s future; and a mix of fascination and skepticism toward artificial intelligence and related developments. The result is precisely that—a blend of elements that ultimately adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
As with several of those influences, most of the action in Billionaire’s Bunker takes place inside the very bunker that gives the show its title. Before arriving there, however, the series introduces a central family conflict: Max (Pau Simón), the son of a wealthy business dynasty, goes on a road trip with his girlfriend. After a brutal car accident, he flees while she dies. He spends years in prison, suffering and hardening, until he is released three years later. His father comes to collect him with urgent news: an international conflict is imminent, and the family has purchased a place in a luxury underground bunker for billionaires. Max initially refuses, but he’s forced to go along anyway.
The bunker itself is presented as a futuristic, high-tech hotel, something like a hidden spaceship where Europe’s richest can supposedly ride out the end of the world. There, Max is confronted with the family of the girl he accidentally killed—her father (played by Argentine actor Joaquín Furriel), his new wife (Agustina Bisio, also from Argentina), and her sister Asia (Alicia Falcó)—as well as his own parents (Natalia Verbeke and Carlos Santos). The tension among these families is immediate and becomes one of the show’s early dramatic engines.
The other core thread lies in uncovering what is really happening inside the bunker. The information is revealed at the end of the first episode—arguably a SPOILER—so skip ahead if you’d rather not know. It turns out the designers of the bunker, who have charged their wealthy “clients” exorbitant sums for entry, are deceiving the guests in ways that are technologically intricate. Let’s just say that reality is not what the inhabitants believe it to be, and that the organizers—led by Minerva (Miren Ibarguren)—have other plans for the billionaires under their watch.
From there, the plot splinters in several directions: conflicts between the guests themselves; between them and the “workers” who run the place (all dressed in color-coded uniforms reminiscent of Squid Game); and even among the organizers. Meanwhile, flashbacks fill in the backstories of the various characters, showing who they are, where they come from, and what drives them. The narrative isn’t really about survival at the end of the world so much as a strange, futuristic riff on class struggle.
The series piles on dramatic twists, romance, sex, relationship problems, family traumas, and other soap-opera staples that unfortunately drag the story down. There’s potentially rich material at its core—from nuclear conflict to the financial games of billionaires, from the anger of the “99.9 percent” toward the “0.1 percent” to the way reality can be warped by information control and artificial intelligence. Yet all of this tends to get overshadowed by subplots focused on personal dramas that feel neither particularly complex nor compelling, leaning more toward clichés and stereotypes.
As an ambitious, high-budget series with a strong conceptual hook, Billionaire’s Bunker is bound to attract attention and spark debate. Its political undercurrent is at the very least debatable (the show sometimes echoes Donald Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” remark—or its opposite), and it peppers in sharp observations about contemporary life (“They’ve domesticated us with €1,000 salaries, delivery pizza, and Netflix,” one character quips—ironically, in a series streaming on Netflix). But alongside these, it delivers arbitrary action sequences that aren’t always what they seem, and a tiresome fixation on supposedly intimate conversations between the leads. While the themes it explores are undeniably current and pressing, the show lacks the dramatic weight to truly hold itself together.
