Bird Box – a review

The world as we know it has ended. A mysterious entity, once seen by a person, forces its victims to commit suicide. Malorie (Sandra Bullock) is surviving with two children (aptly named) Boy and Girl; using their sight only when they are safely inside. But as life gets harder they need to reach shelter by rowing down the river: blind.

On the threshold of the new year 2018 has delivered us not one but two post-apocalyptic thrillers dealing with the senses. First hearing and voice/sound in A quiet place and now sight in Bird Box.

Thematically Bird Box also feels connected to Annihilation.

And like the movie that came before it Bird Box too is very reliant on the ‘gimmick’ it is using. It has to, you have to play this straight or it doesn’t work.

But I have to admit that Bird Box on this basic level is the lesser of the two. In A quiet place you have to stay quiet. That’s all you can do. There is no choice.
In Bird Box, however, you actually have a choice. From the comfortable position of my living room sofa I wondered out loud why nobody blinded him/herself. Bleach, looking at a welding torch or simple piercing your eyes (again, from my comfortable position) the possibilities are endless.

Archetypes?
Having that said, the rest of the movie is quite a well told tale. I would consider it an unofficial remake of The happening since it bares so many similarities, except this time the story works –if you accept that a spiritual entity is solely depended on our ability to see.

What follows is quite the well plotted character-driven story. The archetypes are there: The smart, smug (bastard) lawyer, the naïve mother, the brave elderly woman and the Asian-American computer-wiz (who also happens to be gay). Textbook characters.

But the movie adds scenes and dialogues to these characters to flesh them out.
Malkovich, for instance, plays quite the unlikable chap and the movie could’ve left it at that. But instead it gives him and Bullock an extra scene together that gives his character a bit more depth. He’s still unlikable but by the end of that scene you know that he isn’t criminally unlikable.

The same goes for the quick-witted dialogue peppered throughout the tale. One of the earlier scenes takes place in a hospital where two sisters and the doctor are bickering at each other. This is a wonderful moment to let the characters shine and become more than (in this case): the archetypes of the strong headed-sister, the level-headed sister and the strict doctor.
The actors all gleefully accept these small moments to develop their basic characters.

It’s never the monster.
In this sense Bird Box is more a character-study of what happens to certain types of people in a perilous world instead of a survival story. In fact, the whole premise of a woman and two children rowing down a river blindfolded isn’t the bulk of the tale. The bulk is the flashback, the back-story. Like many post-apocalyptic movies before it it’s not the monster that gets you but rather the people around you.

Cheerleader, Jock, and so on. In your basic (slasher) horror movie you don’t

need to explore the personas behind the archetypes.

You only need to know whose body is being slaughtered by the masked killer; not their personality.

Intermezzo: The zombie endgame.
When it comes to movies exploring the extremities of humans (e.g. our willingness to survive) there are several things to remember. One of them being that we humans will constantly justify our action into the absurd. Even if these action can be considered evil.
“Just following orders.” Is the textbook example of this.

This is something that often pops up as a theme in survival movies or TV-shows.
Would you sacrifice somebody to save many…would you sacrifice somebody to save yourself?

The point is that movies love to bring up these questions but, at the same time, only reward those characters that make the non-evil choice. People who sacrifice others ‘for the greater good’ often get their comeuppance in the end.

Or, in case of the Bible get saved by God in the nick of time.

Bird Box plays with this element of storytelling. And even though Bullock’s Malorie certainly is a level-headed strong personality capable of being ‘evil’, the choices she makes are ‘good’ and the movie rewards her for it.

But to juxtapose this narrative notion (good action delivers good outcome) I always like to focus on the following mind-game involving zombie-movies:

Just imagine that zombies have taken over the world; anybody who dies or gets bitten turns into a flesh eating zombie. Now imagine three generations down.

We humans are hard to kill, evolution shows this. We are like cockroaches, we'll survive anywhere and anything.

But what would humans be like -three generations into the future (after zombies)?
We'd probably have a pretty morbid sense of humour.
Death is a daily occurrence because the world is wild once more.
The people will live in shelters constantly worried; so the 'old age' would drop. Sheltered people die of stress before 65.

Then, of course, strength and dexterity comes for brains. So, probably, the world would be ruled by some numb-nut who happens to be good at surviving.
We will turn out to become agile, dumb survivors who -when they try to make the world a better place- won't live past 35. Pretty much a stone thrown back 2000 years.

Basically: the fun notion about the zombie apocalypse is that 'whichever way you turn it' the human race is screwed.
And ‘evil’ (in a narrative sense) will in fact prevail.

Back to Bird Box.
Visually Bird Box isn’t a very challenging movie. There are some ‘under the covers’ shots that were probably a nightmare to light. But on the other hand a lot of POV shots are of Bullock’s character with a blindfold on so that’s easy.

Also on a story-, or symbolic-level the movie doesn’t truly outdo itself. For example, there are no scenes in a museum or during a sunrise that highlights the beauty of sight. Instead most of the movie takes place in a gray, gritty environment (even indoors) that don’t necessarily makes you happy to be able to see.

There are some smart tent-pole scenes that uses the notion of ‘blindness’ to entice tension like ‘driving blind’ or ‘watching the cameras’. But still the main story behind it all is basically the same as each and every survivalist story/movie before it.

I won't dwell too much on the current rage called the Bird Box challenge.

Let me just say that driving around blind isn't the wisest thing to do.

Not that it matters though, because Bird Box has enough smart dialogue and clever twists and turns to keep events interesting. But, to me, more on a character level than the external problems it throws at me.

Even though I wonder how in the world the birds in the bird box survived everything.

Bird Box is above all a character piece that uses archetypes as a basis but invests in them to make them a bit more human. The actors happily leap at this chance to play fully rounded characters in a dark depressing tale of humanity's doom. But, like any doom-scenario, it is human nature (in fiction at least) to hand out hope.