YMMV / Bio-Dome

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Doyle caused the great chipmunk fire of 1979. Bud and Doyle were revealing their darkest secrets to each other in the Bio-dome's desert thinking that they're about to die, which Doyle backed off at the last second telling the truth about the chipmunk story. Also, considering how much of an idiot Doyle appears to be, would it really be that difficult to believe that he may have somehow lit a chipmunk on fire? Doyle not being able to hold in his laughter when Mr. Leaky brings up the fire again later on could be taken as a moment where Doyle finds it unbelievable that he got away with starting a fire that became a legend.
  • What were Petra and Mimi going for when they decided to "thank" Bud and Doyle for fixing the Bio-dome? Was it just going to be a simple make-out session? Or were they aiming to start something more? In addition, was this moment only going to be a one time thing? Or did Bud and Doyle's transformations impress Petra and Mimi enough to want to start actual relationships with them? Whatever their plan was, it came to a screeching halt once they realized that Bud and Doyle were choosing to stay loyal to their girlfriends outside the dome.
  • Bud and Doyle didn't actually learn any lesson at becoming better people by the end of the movie. Their last scene is them heading into a power plant because Doyle needs to go to the bathroom (just like how they ended up in the bio-dome), which implies that they're about to cause trouble again.
• Anvilicious: The film isn't exactly subtle with its environmental message.
• Awesome Music:
  • Dude. Everyone likes "The Safety Dance" (and "World Destruction", too). Its inclusion in this movie is one of its few praises.
  • The song "5 Needs" that plays during Tenacious D's cameo , which eventually got a limited release 18 years after the movie came out.
• Critical Backlash: Widely considered one of the worst comedies ever, yet it seems to have found a few supporters, as its IMDB grade is a fairly average 4.5 and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 51% (compared to a 4% approval by critics). Stephen Baldwin even noted in his autobiography "everywhere I go I have some kid in his late teens or early twenties come up to me and tell me that this is their favorite movie".
• Designated Hero: Bud and Doyle are, at best, too stupid to realize how annoying, destructive or simply outright disrespectful they are and their stupidity is intended to make up for all of the damage they cause to an expensive science experiment that has been in development for years.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Faulkner, who's not only the most sensible and best-performed character in the movie, but who's so Unintentionally Sympathetic that you'll be practically begging him to kill the two leads at the end. He also has what's considered to be one of the only genuinely funny lines in the movie.
• Fanfic Fuel
  • The movie ends with Bud and Doyle supposedly about to get into trouble again at a nuclear power plant. What trouble could they possibly cause this time for the people working the plant?
  • Bud and Doyle ditch their girlfriends for Petra and Mimi.
• Fridge Logic: The two slackers had only been in the dome a few minutes. It wouldn't have damaged any year long scientific studies to boot them out and reset the clock by a few minutes.
• Moral Event Horizon: Because of the extreme degrees of annoyance that Bud and Doyle had demonstrated up to that point one can still find some sympathy for Faulkner when he abandons Bud and Doyle in the desert part of the dome to die, but when he decides to blow the dome sky-high with everybody inside, that's the moment he completely loses it.
• Nightmare Fuel: Shore's laugh after winning the "for fun" Rock–Paper–Scissors match.
• One-Scene Wonder: Tenacious D playing at an environmentalist party.
• Padding: A majority of the film's run time is just vignettes of two idiots messing around in a bio-dome. Plenty of it could be cut without affecting the plot in the slightest.
• Rooting for the Empire: Faulkner. In spades. His only crime seems to be being a Jerkass towards the two main characters — but when you consider all of the damage and torture they inflict on the experiment and its team, you'd probably want to kill them yourself!
• Squick: Bud and Doyle are disgusting slobs throughout the movie, but one key moment stands out. The two are watching television, and at one point Bud shoves his shoeless foot in Doyle's face, to which Doyle responds by chewing off one of his toenails with his teeth.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The idea of a group of people surviving inside the bio-dome, completely sealed off from the public, could've easily made for an interesting premise, written seriously or for comedy. Word of God states that this was the original intent before Executive Meddling kicked in.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: William Atherton (Faulkner) is probably the one person that actually tried to put in a passable performance amongst the main cast.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: You really can't blame Faulker for wanting to murder Bud and Doyle, who have done nothing but torture him for months with their annoying, destructive habits with no consequences.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Bud and Doyle are two of the most notorious examples in movie history and are often cited as the reason the movie doesn't work. The movie seems to want to sell them as, at best, two guys who just wanna bring a little fun to a literal and figurative sterile environment, and that fun takes the form of doing irreparable damage to a serious, potentially life-changing scientific study simply by being their lethally stupid, manchild selves. And when they're not being unintentionally destructive, they're immature jerkasses who neglect their girlfriends, if not just incredibly annoying (Bud's Annoying Laugh alone is particularly infamous). It's hard to see just what about them the audience is supposed to like, let alone tolerate.
• Values Dissonance: The gag of Bud and Doyle sneaking into the beds of the two female scientists to feel them up while they're sleeping, which is about as unambiguous an example of rape that can be made (as, being asleep, they can't consent), was already pushing the envelope in 1996 and is only barely remedied by the two of them getting kicked out once the women wake up. In a post-#MeToo world, the consensus would be that the two got off far too easy and having them not immediately kicked out or even arrested makes the scientists look like even bigger idiots.

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