Bird Box
If you don’t have a favorite post-apocalyptic film, television show, or book by now, you either don’t like the genre or you just aren’t paying attention. Hollywood’s favorite genre is flooding the market and it is so popular that the film rights to Bird Box were optioned in 2013, almost a full year before the books release. The potential for a Hunger Games, Maze Runner type franchise is enticing and with The Walking Dead still getting over 5 million people to watch weekly after 9 seasons, it’s hard not to see why film studios all want a piece of the pie.
But with so much content comes a lack of ideas. Whether the world was taken over by aliens, zombies, or unseen monsters, the themes and tropes are mainly the same. Friendship and coming together are popular but lately, parenthood has become the “metaphor” of choice. During the apocalypse, parenting is difficult. But more specifically, being a mother during the apocalypse is difficult. This is a fact that male screenwriters want to make sure that you know. While children are what give a father the courage to sacrifice himself, children are what give a mother the strength to live another day. It’s a weird trope to stick with but it mostly works for A Quiet Place. Bird Box doesn’t have such luck, however, and is unfortunately one of the most generic films I’ve seen this year.
The film opens with Malorie (Sandra Bullock) lecturing two small children about the journey they are about to take down the river. The scene does a good enough job creating a mystique around the movie’s plot and we even get to see some birds being shoved into a box, though we find out why much later. We then flashback to five years prior where Malorie is just a woman who likes to paint and treat her pregnancy like a mild inconvenience. She is visited by her sister Jess (the sadly underutilized Sarah Paulson) before her doctor’s appointment and they have all of the witty back and forth you’d expect of sister’s in film before dismissing the news report of mass suicides in Europe.
The film wastes very little time getting right into the madness after that. There is something out there that it making people kill themselves and no one knows what it is. The standard pre-apocalypse mayhem ensues where people forget how to drive and to not run out in the middle of the street as everyone is in a huge panic. After watching her sister die, Malorie is saved by a group of people who are taking shelter in Greg’s (BD Wong) home. From here (thanks partially to the opening scene) it is clear that most of these people won’t make it but all of them get some time to shine. John Malkovich is great, Lil Rel Howery and Trevante Rhodes are solid, and Jackie Weaver and Machine Gun Kelly are good with what they are given. It is interesting watching them all fight about what to do to survive, but a lot of the fights are so repetitive that they start to slow the film down a little and more perhaps more importantly, they just don’t make sense realistically.
Bird Box has generally been compared unfavorably to A Quiet Place, but the only thing that A Quiet Place does better than Bird Box (other than less stupid character decisions) is create tension. There is an urgency in A Quiet Place that is never quite there during Bird Box. In Krasinski’s world, any mistake could cost you your life but in director Susanne Bier‘s film, staying in your house could help you die of old age (unless, of course, you’re prone to making stupid decisions). The choice to not show the monster is an obvious one. The characters aren’t supposed to look at it and when or if they do they see something so horrible and personal it leads them to commit suicide. So, leaving the audience in the dark, in theory, is the smart play. It is confounding then that the decision doesn’t work. My biggest issue with Bird Box is that it somehow didn’t manage to make me care about anyone in the movie. I didn’t care about Malorie because she was so distant, I didn’t care about Tom (Trevante Rhodes) because he was an idiot, I didn’t care about Douglas (John Malkovich) because he was a dick. The list is endless. With a movie like this, where death is imminent, you need characters that the audience can care about. That is where the tension is. When you like a character in a horror movie, you’re holding your breath and hoping they don’t die. When you don’t care, you spend time questioning why you’re even watching the film in the first place.
There is so much talent involved in this film for such a lackluster effort. There is so much potential in a story like this and I genuinely wish that it could have been more gripping, more involved, and less tired of itself. I haven’t read the book but the film doesn’t feel like it knows what it wants to be or what it wants to say. There’s a substantial number of post-apocalyptic films and television shows now. People are obsessed with what the world will look like if a large portion of the population just died off. Not all of those films and shows are good, but a lot of them are too intriguing and notable to waste time with this one. It is beautifully filmed and if looks were all that mattered this would have gotten an almost perfect score. If you just enjoy the genre it may be worth checking out but if not, you’ll be better off just enjoying the memes.
I give it 2 ½ out of 5 trash cans.
