Post by Deleted on Jan 9, 2019 9:05:37 GMT
Just watched it and I thought it was... not very good at all!
Without getting into spoilers, I would say it suffers from a terribly flawed structure that removes any surprises, poorly developed characters, a threat that's unclear in its capabilities and not especially menacing, a baffling and underbaked theme of coping with motherhood, and as the cherry on top, some cringy dialogue that replicants programmed by Joss Whedon would say. I think I would recommend The Happening, a similar film in a lot of respects, over Bird Box because it is much more entertaining and no less dumb. Bird Box is not without good moments and good ideas but they're meager chunks of delicious, succulent meat mixed into an otherwise bland, tepid, grey water stew.
I do not recommend this movie to anybody who likes movies to enjoy them. I do recommend it to people that like to think about movies as it is an interesting mess. I do have a lot to say about the film, and I don't expect people to read it or care, so the above is my summarized opinion and from here I will be going into the film itself-- if you so choose to remove the blindfold.
(also, minor spoilers for The Mist)
Firstly, the things I liked, because I did like some aspects of this film and it will be brief because I disliked a lot more.
I liked the scene in the car when the impact detectors started going off as the creatures were close to the car. This was very Aliens (or even Alien) and I thought it was a neat concept. There wasn't any tension, for reasons I'll get into later, but it was a nice idea. In the same scene, I also liked when he ran over a body and said "It's just a speedbump." I would have liked to have seen more of that from the film. That sort of denial, where people are overwhelmed and can't deal with the gravity of the situation and try to block out or downplay just how horrific things have become, feels like an authentic response.
I liked the scene with Malkovich and Bullock in the kitchen. It was nice to see the asshole character connecting a little with the protagonist, who is also an asshole but not as much of one. For just a split second, you think these two might get along and maybe he'll soften a bit, but then the toothache that is the structure of the film throbs and you remember you shouldn't care.
I liked that they never showed the creatures or tried to explain them. Again, not without a glaring, horrible flaw, but I do respect that the film kept them mysterious and almost Lovecraftian. I was genuinely worried at points that they'd show them and tank what little goodwill I had towards the film.
That's about it. Let's get on to what I thought was shit.
STRUCTURE. Capitalized, bolded, italicized, underlined. Why, why, why is this film done mostly in flashback? We know from the first sequence that it ends up with Sandra Bullock and two kids in a boat. We know that everybody else of significance dies. There is absolutely no tension as a result. Take a film like The Mist. Imagine if that film started with the five of them in the Land Rover and then cut back to how the mist started and then bounced back and forth from what happened in the supermarket and what happened as they drove to find safety. It would deflate the entire film because we already know how things are going to shake out and not to care about these characters.
That's absolutely fine in some stories, but if you're trying to build tension which this film is, it's best not to reveal within the first ten minutes that none of these "characters" matter because they're already dead. That might have worked if Sandra Bullock's character Malorie was indistinguishable from where she started out and the mystery was what made her that way; but she doesn't change much at all by the end of the film.
So lets get into characters and the trainwreck therein. Malorie wasn't a wilting flower to begin with and she doesn't become toughened by the experience. She started tough and ended tough. She's allegedly a loner that is detached from others but we see her getting on fine with her sister, her doctor, and the other survivors, and even gets a new boyfriend. The only thing that changes about her is that she learns to like children enough to give them names and accept their existence. This is her entire arc. And it sucks.
Who else do we have? Oh, we have granny lady whose later death is maybe supposed to be meaningful even though she was barely present aside from smashing a pot over Malkovich's character, at which point I forgot she was still in the movie. We also have cop lady and punk guy who don't do much of anything until they abscond with the car, which should have actually been done by Malkovich because he was the one who wanted to stay in the supermarket and was the vocal about wanting to leave the group, but fuck it, these two non-characters can be the ones who can drive off with motives known only to them and not us, the audience.
We also have other pregnant lady, who terrified me to my core when she arrived, because I thought "Oh no. They're not going to do a double birth scene. Surely no film would do that." Then I thought, "Nah, that's too hamfisted and cheesy. That would be like something from a soap opera. They're going to go somewhere else with this." AND THEN THEY FUCKING DID IT. Friends, I punched the ground when this happened. As far as the character goes, she was just as one-dimensional and pointless as the rest.
Who else? The quirky guy who wrote novels and died needlessly. Greg, whose name I only remember because he said a line no human being would say: "Come on, Greg. Focus." People occasionally talk to themselves but who uses their first name when doing it? Nobody is the correct answer. Non-characters both.
So that leaves us with Tom and Malkovich, the only partially developed characters. Tom has the most development of any secondary character and that is to say, not much at all. Why is Tom so accepting of people and willing to take chances to let them in despite the risks? Who knows? Because he's just a nice guy I guess. As far as Malkovich goes, he's just the asshole. You'd think the fact his wife died saving Bullock would cause tension between the two for the rest of their time together, but NO, she cocks a shotgun a few times and that entire subplot is dropped like a rock into a septic tank. Neither of these guys matter because the structure of the film makes it clear they die, so no tension, and by the end, no impact on Bullock's character aside from Tom perhaps teaching her to give kids something to hope for, a lesson he apparently didn't teach her in the five years they spent alone rearing the kids, and that only manifested itself at the climax of the film.
Girl and Boy are non-characters but truthfully, Girl seemed like the more competent one and there was a sliver of tension regarding her survival so I was rooting for her. There were other characters but who cares.
So the characters suck. The premise of the world-ending threat is good, right? Well, sure. Too bad the threat itself is botched. Seeing it makes most people want to commit suicide. It makes crazy people want to make others see it while they can function normally. It can trick you into looking at it. It can do a lot of stuff but the only thing it can't do is directly hurt you. So let's be generous and call it a cosmic horror where insane people are already on the same page and sane people can't handle the experience and just kill themselves. The creatures give you a massive dose of LSD with a heaping side of schizophrenia and most people aren't able to cope. It's staring into the abyss. That's fine. Again, very Lovecraftian.
But here's the catch. Why does every sane person react that way? Most people suffering from insanity were at one point sane and they didn't kill themselves. The film seems to be sending the message that if you're overloaded with a bit of the insanity juice, your natural response is going to be to off yourself, which is frankly horseshit. The insane guys didn't kill themselves when they went insane so why is it a given that anybody else would? Thankfully, the film makes this point for me (that there is no consistency) when Tom shoots the last insane bandit despite being under the influence of whatever mind-altering nonsense the creatures use. So I guess it turns you insane but sometimes there's a delay, or willpower can overcome it, or whatever.
That one might be nitpicking but honestly, I was genuinely confused at what the creatures could and couldn't do and how characters would react to it. Sometimes, they just off themselves. Other times, they have a moment of rationality and then off themselves. Sometimes they're insane but can pose as sane. God, it's just a mess. I never thought I'd say this but this is something The Happening got right. The plant wind hits you, you're done for. You need a flowchart for Bird Box by comparison.
I could go on and on and on but I think I'm just talking to myself now, so I'll cut it here. Thanks to anybody who bothered reading this.
Without getting into spoilers, I would say it suffers from a terribly flawed structure that removes any surprises, poorly developed characters, a threat that's unclear in its capabilities and not especially menacing, a baffling and underbaked theme of coping with motherhood, and as the cherry on top, some cringy dialogue that replicants programmed by Joss Whedon would say. I think I would recommend The Happening, a similar film in a lot of respects, over Bird Box because it is much more entertaining and no less dumb. Bird Box is not without good moments and good ideas but they're meager chunks of delicious, succulent meat mixed into an otherwise bland, tepid, grey water stew.
I do not recommend this movie to anybody who likes movies to enjoy them. I do recommend it to people that like to think about movies as it is an interesting mess. I do have a lot to say about the film, and I don't expect people to read it or care, so the above is my summarized opinion and from here I will be going into the film itself-- if you so choose to remove the blindfold.
(also, minor spoilers for The Mist)
Firstly, the things I liked, because I did like some aspects of this film and it will be brief because I disliked a lot more.
I liked the scene in the car when the impact detectors started going off as the creatures were close to the car. This was very Aliens (or even Alien) and I thought it was a neat concept. There wasn't any tension, for reasons I'll get into later, but it was a nice idea. In the same scene, I also liked when he ran over a body and said "It's just a speedbump." I would have liked to have seen more of that from the film. That sort of denial, where people are overwhelmed and can't deal with the gravity of the situation and try to block out or downplay just how horrific things have become, feels like an authentic response.
I liked the scene with Malkovich and Bullock in the kitchen. It was nice to see the asshole character connecting a little with the protagonist, who is also an asshole but not as much of one. For just a split second, you think these two might get along and maybe he'll soften a bit, but then the toothache that is the structure of the film throbs and you remember you shouldn't care.
I liked that they never showed the creatures or tried to explain them. Again, not without a glaring, horrible flaw, but I do respect that the film kept them mysterious and almost Lovecraftian. I was genuinely worried at points that they'd show them and tank what little goodwill I had towards the film.
That's about it. Let's get on to what I thought was shit.
STRUCTURE. Capitalized, bolded, italicized, underlined. Why, why, why is this film done mostly in flashback? We know from the first sequence that it ends up with Sandra Bullock and two kids in a boat. We know that everybody else of significance dies. There is absolutely no tension as a result. Take a film like The Mist. Imagine if that film started with the five of them in the Land Rover and then cut back to how the mist started and then bounced back and forth from what happened in the supermarket and what happened as they drove to find safety. It would deflate the entire film because we already know how things are going to shake out and not to care about these characters.
That's absolutely fine in some stories, but if you're trying to build tension which this film is, it's best not to reveal within the first ten minutes that none of these "characters" matter because they're already dead. That might have worked if Sandra Bullock's character Malorie was indistinguishable from where she started out and the mystery was what made her that way; but she doesn't change much at all by the end of the film.
So lets get into characters and the trainwreck therein. Malorie wasn't a wilting flower to begin with and she doesn't become toughened by the experience. She started tough and ended tough. She's allegedly a loner that is detached from others but we see her getting on fine with her sister, her doctor, and the other survivors, and even gets a new boyfriend. The only thing that changes about her is that she learns to like children enough to give them names and accept their existence. This is her entire arc. And it sucks.
Who else do we have? Oh, we have granny lady whose later death is maybe supposed to be meaningful even though she was barely present aside from smashing a pot over Malkovich's character, at which point I forgot she was still in the movie. We also have cop lady and punk guy who don't do much of anything until they abscond with the car, which should have actually been done by Malkovich because he was the one who wanted to stay in the supermarket and was the vocal about wanting to leave the group, but fuck it, these two non-characters can be the ones who can drive off with motives known only to them and not us, the audience.
We also have other pregnant lady, who terrified me to my core when she arrived, because I thought "Oh no. They're not going to do a double birth scene. Surely no film would do that." Then I thought, "Nah, that's too hamfisted and cheesy. That would be like something from a soap opera. They're going to go somewhere else with this." AND THEN THEY FUCKING DID IT. Friends, I punched the ground when this happened. As far as the character goes, she was just as one-dimensional and pointless as the rest.
Who else? The quirky guy who wrote novels and died needlessly. Greg, whose name I only remember because he said a line no human being would say: "Come on, Greg. Focus." People occasionally talk to themselves but who uses their first name when doing it? Nobody is the correct answer. Non-characters both.
So that leaves us with Tom and Malkovich, the only partially developed characters. Tom has the most development of any secondary character and that is to say, not much at all. Why is Tom so accepting of people and willing to take chances to let them in despite the risks? Who knows? Because he's just a nice guy I guess. As far as Malkovich goes, he's just the asshole. You'd think the fact his wife died saving Bullock would cause tension between the two for the rest of their time together, but NO, she cocks a shotgun a few times and that entire subplot is dropped like a rock into a septic tank. Neither of these guys matter because the structure of the film makes it clear they die, so no tension, and by the end, no impact on Bullock's character aside from Tom perhaps teaching her to give kids something to hope for, a lesson he apparently didn't teach her in the five years they spent alone rearing the kids, and that only manifested itself at the climax of the film.
Girl and Boy are non-characters but truthfully, Girl seemed like the more competent one and there was a sliver of tension regarding her survival so I was rooting for her. There were other characters but who cares.
So the characters suck. The premise of the world-ending threat is good, right? Well, sure. Too bad the threat itself is botched. Seeing it makes most people want to commit suicide. It makes crazy people want to make others see it while they can function normally. It can trick you into looking at it. It can do a lot of stuff but the only thing it can't do is directly hurt you. So let's be generous and call it a cosmic horror where insane people are already on the same page and sane people can't handle the experience and just kill themselves. The creatures give you a massive dose of LSD with a heaping side of schizophrenia and most people aren't able to cope. It's staring into the abyss. That's fine. Again, very Lovecraftian.
But here's the catch. Why does every sane person react that way? Most people suffering from insanity were at one point sane and they didn't kill themselves. The film seems to be sending the message that if you're overloaded with a bit of the insanity juice, your natural response is going to be to off yourself, which is frankly horseshit. The insane guys didn't kill themselves when they went insane so why is it a given that anybody else would? Thankfully, the film makes this point for me (that there is no consistency) when Tom shoots the last insane bandit despite being under the influence of whatever mind-altering nonsense the creatures use. So I guess it turns you insane but sometimes there's a delay, or willpower can overcome it, or whatever.
That one might be nitpicking but honestly, I was genuinely confused at what the creatures could and couldn't do and how characters would react to it. Sometimes, they just off themselves. Other times, they have a moment of rationality and then off themselves. Sometimes they're insane but can pose as sane. God, it's just a mess. I never thought I'd say this but this is something The Happening got right. The plant wind hits you, you're done for. You need a flowchart for Bird Box by comparison.
I could go on and on and on but I think I'm just talking to myself now, so I'll cut it here. Thanks to anybody who bothered reading this.