Bird Box's premise is an interesting one. Some plague or monster is devastating the earth and if you see it, you kill yourself. It is a very interesting premise that has a lot of grounds to be exciting and suspenseful. And at first, I thought it would be like that. Seeing how Sandra Bullock's character tells her kids to keep the blindfolds no matter what happens or what they hear, and if they take them off they could die; it all seems pretty interesting. However, things slowly start to fall apart.
For starters, one awful aspect of the films is the editing and the pacing. Just the first 20-30 min of this film shows the entirety of how poorly edited and paced this film was. The movie starts with Bullock telling her kids to cover their eyes with the blindfolds. After that, the film goes into one of its many flashback sequences. Bullock is seen with her sister, and they have a very brief conversation. During this conversation, the characters mention how there is this plague in Russia making people go crazy. Not much thought or attention is put into that, so they leave to go to the hospital to check up on Bullock's baby. Minutes later, in the hospital after checking up on Bullock's character's baby, they see a girl banging her head on a glass window killing herself. A couple of seconds later, Sandra Bullock mentions, after not really paying attention to the news story about this plague in Russia, declares that the plague has arrived in America. A couple of seconds later, an explosion happens and then Bullock's sister kills herself due to the plague. All of this happens in the first 12 minutes of the film. If you thought this paragraph was annoying to read, with so many things happening one after the other, that's because this was the first 12 minutes of this film. We never get attached to Bullock's sister, things happen so quickly you have no idea what is going on, and all these crazy events happening in the span of 12 minutes lets nothing marinate to the audience. Instead of taking its time to set anything up, such as in other great apocalyptic films like Children of Men, they just get to the point with no weight attached to anything that is going on.
What makes the editing worse is that this film is one of the most visually bland and uncreative films in a long time. It is by no means visually bad, but it is so painfully average. No great visuals, no creative use of colors or placement of objects and characters--nothing. In a film where the characters need to cover their eyes from the monster, you would think there would be a lot of creative shots and sequences to showcase the characters fear; maybe trying to keep us in the dark along with the characters themselves. Maybe making the film visually claustrophobic, showcasing how the characters probably feel that way with the blindfolds on. Well, that is what a good creative film would do. This, however, is not one of those types of films.
One sequence in particular, where the characters have to drive to a store to get some supplies, had such great set up for a visually scary and tense scene; yet, the film lets that down. They cover the windows of the car and only use the GPS in order to not see the thing that is causing everyone to kill themselves. So, how do they film this sequence? Do they solely focus the camera inside the car, trying to pull us in with how the characters are feeling? Nope. This scene is shot in the same style as when Bullock's sister drove away from the hospital. Just shots outside of the car, some shots inside, sweeping shots when they pass through something, and some reaction shots. Why? Why are these two totally different scenes with totally different purposes in emotions and style, shot the exact same way? This is just lazy and bland visual storytelling.
These, however, would not be as big of a problem if we had some good characters to latch on too. Yet, we don't have any good characters in this film. Every character we meet have nothing interesting about them; they are essentially cliches. We have the one asshole character, who opposes giving aid to anyone. We have the super nice strong guy, who is always willing to lend a hand and willing to have the forced romance with the main female character with. We have the weird hippy guy who writes novels about the end of the world and how he theorized this will happen. These are cliches that we have seen in nearly every other bad film in the past. We get maybe one scene where we hear one story about these character's lives prior to this outbreak, and that is about it. Even if they were cliches, if the writers gave us a decent backstory to these characters, then at least we could be somewhat attached to them. However, not only do these characters not have any interesting personality or backstory, but they are all cliches. They did the bare minimum when it came to characters.
They also did the bare minimum in terms of giving us an overall theme of the film. Maybe I did not pay attention that much, but I really did not see an overall theme put throughout the film. Some say it could be about the difficulties of motherhood...but I did not see that at all. Without providing a good theme, the monsters in the film seem pointless. What is the point of a monster making people kill themselves if there is no relation to an overall theme or to a specific character's plight? Imagine, for instance, if in The Babadook, the monster in that film did not represent depression. It would make the film a lot more boring and less entertaining. In that film, the monster representing depression relates to the overall theme of the main character's depression and her battling to combat her depression. Bird Box, however, doesn't do any of that. The monsters are just monsters, every event happens and there is no big theme attached to any action or character in this film.
Overall, This film is such a disappointment. Not because I had any hopes or expectations when going into the film, but rather, because seeing what Netflix could and have done in terms of original content lately, and seeing this cliche-ridden film get so much attention just baffles me. When you have films like Roma, a film telling a personal story about a family, a film that gets you emotionally invested in the characters plights and hardships; or films like Annihilation, a film that talks about humanity and biology and is one of the most visual and haunting films in a long time, seeing Bird Box get so much attention is just disappointing. Bird Box has nothing going for it. Sure, Bullock is decent and there are like 3 decently shot scenes, but this is a film that is just so forgettable and boring. Skip this one
Score: 2/10
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