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Netflix latest attempt at a post-apocalyptic thriller, Bird Box, is a mess. This is strange because none of the components individually are bad. The source material is strong. Both directing and writing do their jobs well. The acting is quite good. Yet the whole somehow ends up being less than the sum of its parts.
Spoilers ahead, since I don’t want you to waste your time on it.
It’s a little surprising the movie is hovering in the 60% range on Rotten Tomatoes. There are apparently enough fans of the genre, Netflix, Sandra Bullock, director Susanne Bier, or a combination of the four to drive a majority of reviewers to give it a thumbs up. I’m personally a fan of all four components, yet I couldn’t get myself to like this movie. Maybe the combination set my standards too high, but I don’t think that’s it. The final half hour felt like M. Night Shyamalan rushing to meet a deadline than anything suspenseful or coherent.
I’ve loved Bier’s work in the past. Her directing of The Night Manager was superb. But this attempt seemed to try too hard to be clever. Plenty of potential substance that ended up getting wrapped into characters we didn’t care about long term and a boogeyman we didn’t really fear.
The premise seemed strong, albeit unoriginal. A strange event is happening all across the world where people who see… something… end up instantly wanting to commit suicide in the most gruesome way they can find in that instant. Even though I couldn’t get myself to watch The Happening, the premise here seemed very similar, though with demons or something instead of trees.
The survivors have to keep their eyes blindfolded at all times, which makes their trip to the grocery store quite eventful. All it takes is a quick glimpse of… something… and they’re done. That is, unless they’re already insane, in which case the effect is quite different. Instead of wanting to commit suicide, insane people who see the… something… think that it’s beautiful and travel around trying to force people to open their eyes.
The reason I keep calling it… something… is because we never know what it is. The only partial depiction we get of the creatures is in drawings from one of the aforementioned crazy people, but even the drawings don’t do much to reveal what it actually is. We know it’s… something… because when it surrounds a car that has its windows blacked out, we see its shadow going around and over the vehicle. We also see it rustling shrubbery in the distance as it chases Bullock’s character through the woods.
But the sense of fear never really materializes. We know it can’t actually touch the characters for some reason. Instead, it tries to coax people into opening their eyes through whispers from dead loved ones. Creepy? Perhaps. Scary? No. In the final scenes she does more damage by running through the woods blindfolded than simply walking calmly as she should.
Then, there’s the titular “characters,” the birds in the box. They did nothing. I’m not saying they weren’t as important as they should have been. I’m saying they were completely worthless. They could sense the… somethings… whenever they were close, but this wasn’t used for anything through the entire movie. They didn’t warn the characters as the few times they actually started squawking, the presence of the monsters was already well known. One can say the actually meaning of the title is the ending when the characters end up in a place that has an aviary, but that’s a stretch, not to mention it had no real impact.
This movie was a waste of talent that tries so hard to make the main characters unlikable from the start. Bullock is pregnant but clearly doesn’t want to be, even naming her real and adopted kids “Boy” and “Girl.” Granted, she did this because she didn’t believe in false hope in the post-apocalyptic world in which they were born in which they were born, but we get the feeling from the start she might have named her son “Boy” even if the world didn’t fall apart around them. Then, there’s John Malkovich whose character’s only redemption comes in the form of his death.
Sometimes I watch movies with Rotten Tomato scores in the 50s or 60s in hopes of finding a gem that most critics didn’t understand. This time, it was the opposite. I’m shocked that over 60% of critics actually liked it.
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SPOILERS:
I felt like the author of this review was on their phone while watching this movie. The intention of the director’s style to me.. was to allow each individual viewer to conjure up their own physical depiction of these terrible beings.
To say the birds were “worthless” is asinine to say the least. The birds were a form of affirmation of their fears rather than just a warning, though there were plenty of times they acted as the latter as well.
The aviary served as a beacon of hope for life to continue as normal as realtively possible. The blind almost serve as guardians of this hope and the key to a prosperous community.
I personally thought it was pretty good. I didn’t mind not seeing the monsters.
Whelp this is a surefire way to make sure I never bother with this site for reviews of anything. I didn’t like it either, but its possible to not like something and not be a miserable person about it. This “review” is terrible.