Anyone remember 'Bird Box' (2018)? For some reason or another this film made a huge splash upon its initial release. I couldn't go anywhere without seeing or hearing about it. And yet, I never actually got around to watching it and I'm not entirely sure why. It might be that I had heard very mixed things and so thought it wasn't worth my time, or it might have been that my experience with Netflix films had been pretty shit up into this point. Whatever the reason, I missed the initial wave this film made, and then it seemed to suddenly just go, never to be mentioned again. So in usual punctual fashion I am reviewing it now, two years after everyone has stopped giving two shits. The film follows Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and is split between two different timelines; when the unknown force first appears and five years afterward. She is an introverted artist who is pregnant and resents her pregnancy. After going for an ultrasound she and her sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson) are caught amid chaos as this unknown force starts to make people kill themselves. Malorie escapes to a nearby house where a group of survivors are holed up. They soon learn that opening your eyes whilst outside leads to this force making you kill yourself, forcing the group to learn how to survive in this new world.
This film had a very mixed reception when it was released, a lot of people really liked it and a lot of people really hated it. I think that it is just fine. It's not great, it's not terrible, it's fine. There are quite a lot of things here I enjoy. For one, it has a great cast. Going into this film I knew very little about it and the only cast member I knew was Sandra Bullock and so I was pleasantly surprised when I ket seeing actors I recognised. John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes, B.D. Wong, Tom Hollander, even Machine Gun Kelly makes an appearance and they all do good jobs. Even the actors that I had not seen before are good in the film. There are a couple of moments where people ham it up a little bit. Tom Hollander and Danielle Macdonald are guilty of this as is John Malkovich but that is because he is John Malkovich, but on the whole everyone does a really good job. Sandra Bullock is great in the lead role. Her character is quite a complex one and as the film goes on it becomes a more and more challenging role to perform and she does well, carrying the film for large parts. The film is a good looking one. The direction and production design are very solid and lead to an interesting visual experience, especially during the river scenes which were where the film, for me, was at its strongest. A lot of the production design was similar to what you would see in other dystopian style films, but it is executed well and I did feel like this was a world ravaged by an unknown force. Speaking of this unknown force I have seen several articles and videos explaining what the monsters are to which I ask, why? Isn't it a much more tense experience if it is unseen? If your imagination can fill in the blanks for you? I think so and I'm glad the film never chose to 'show the monster' as it were. And while on the subject of tension I think the film has some great tense moments. Not all of what they try lands but there were a few times I felt myself tensing up. The film also has some properly brutal death scenes which I am never going to complain about (that sounds worse than I expected it to).
Despite all the positives of the film there are some negatives and, while not as numerous as the positives, they are much more heinous and are a large detriment to the film. First off this film is needlessly long. It clocks in at around 1 hour 55 minutes (not including in credits) which isn't all that long really, but for a film like this it most definitely is. The film often feels bloated and like it is trying to do and say so much and it doesn't need to. The premise of the film is a good one and you have a great cast, make it laser-focused, make it 90 minutes and voila you have a better film already. This bloat is the biggest problem of the film. It is a film that feels like it is trying to say a lot but ends up saying very little. It is a film that is mostly about Malorie's fear of being a mother and it explores this them well, all until the last 20 minutes where it suddenly becomes rushed and therefore unsatisfying. There are also a lot of other themes in the film that seem to be picked up and dropped for no reason at all. Case in point, the damn horses. The word horse must be said about 24.67 million times in the first 20 minutes of the film and it feels like this is going to be a major theme of the film. Nah, it's not. The script, on the whole, is a big problem in the film. There are some truly terrible lines of dialogue and character interactions and there are also some odd tonal shifts that hit you in the face out of nowhere. One of these is where some of the group go on a supply run to a nearby supermarket. This is one of the more tense scenes in the film and it ends with a cliched joke which doesn't fit the tone of the scene at all. This happens on more than one occasion in the film and each time it is jarring.
'Bird Box' is a film that I went into half expecting to hate and it was maybe these lowly expectations that made me think that it wasn't all that bad. It is a well-made film and has some great visual moments. It is well performed and it has some real moments of tension that work. The script is shoddy and the film does try to fit in far too many themes and underlying meanings, but on the whole I thought it was fine. I had heard a lot of people say this was a rip off of 'A Quiet Place' (2018) but I think it is a lot closer to M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Happening' (2008). Now, I haven't actually seen 'The Happening' in full and so would feel uncomfortable saying 'Bird Box' is better than it, but seeing as 'The Happening' is famously one of the worst films ever made I think it is quite a safe bet. Despite this, I don't recommend the film. Yeah it's fine, it is too long for the quality of film it is and so isn't worth your time.