One of my favourite films in 2018 was the blockbuster film Birdbox. It stirred up a lot of talk on the internet and even got a trend going on for a while. And, just like many people on the internet at that time, I wanted a second part. We never got anything like that until now, in 2023, when Birdbox Barcelona came to us.
What I hoped to see was a second part to the original film, but as the weeks went by and I never saw any sign that it might happen, I moved on. This Barcelona version wasn't going to be like a second part of the film but a Spanish remake of the film, yet I was eager to watch it.
I was eager to watch it so that I could once again indulge myself in the thrills and intrigue I got from the original film, as though I were watching it for the very first time. After it all, I felt like this film might even be a disrespect to the Sandra Bullock Birdbox film, the original.
I had high hopes for it before starting the film, of course, simply because I expected the level of energy in its predecessor to be replicated in this film, if not surpassed. And when the first few minutes seemed to deliver just that, I really thought I was in for a treat. I was wrong.
There are certain aspects of a film that are really important, especially in making it enjoyable for its audience. Amongst many of them are storyline and character development. How the story proceeds from scene to scene, concept to concept, and how much depth the characters of the story carry are very crucial things in a film.
The general idea we have here in this film is that there is an entity that shows up one day, and the world has never remained the same ever since. At the sight of it, one would become suicidal instantly and immediately seek the quickest means to end their lives. There were survivors—people who managed to keep their eyes closed when they were outside, where they could see the entity.
The end goal of the story was for those survivors to find a safe space that somehow exists, thanks to earlier survivors, but have to navigate around the hysteria in the special type of people that could look at the entity and not be suicidal but enslaved to do their bidding.
The majority of the introduction of these creatures that we never could see, the entities, was done in the first Birdbox film. Hence, this Barcelona version had enough room to develop something over that and survive something fresh. It seemed like that was going to be the case in the beginning—like there was going to be deeper intensity—but the film seemed to drag.
Birdbos Barcelona seemed to drag as, rather than providing some form of premise as to how it all started with the entities as the first film had already done that, they started to branch out into the past of its protagonist, which was okay until it started to seem like a deviation from the whole point of the film, especially for the fact that it all did not necessarily contribute to the film's plot.
The moment I knew that I probably wouldn't enjoy this film was when it seemed like things were going to get a bit spicy when some crazy plot to conspire against a group of survivors happened, and then it was going to repeat itself again. "Is this going to be some kind of loop now, eh?" I thought to myself, as it seemed like there wasn't going to be anything novel in the film after all.
Truly, there was nothing novel about this film. And another reason is the fact that character development is at an absolute zero in this film. There were perhaps about 10 main characters in this film, and their characters were almost redundant after certain points in the film. Why? Well, they kept dieing off before they could actually, you know, develop, or they were just bland for most of the film. The presence or absence of a large majority of the characters meant totally nothing in the film, much unlike the Sandra Bullock Birdbox, the first one.
The only addition this film made to its predecessor was a little more insight into what the entities might be and how they existed. Emphasis on "maybe," however—because it was all still vague at the end of it all. Other than that, the characters in this film all seemed to me like they were chickens running aimlessly, waiting to be picked up by those entities. There sure isn't any fun in that.
Many things didn't exactly add up, but I couldn't care less at a point in the film. What was more appalling to find was that I really did not enjoy the acting performance of the protagonist. It was bland. It lacked depth and quality for me.
I have berated this film this much because it really didn't quite cut it for me in many ways. I felt disappointed that it couldn't even reach the bar its predecessor had, let alone surpass it. I would simply give it a rating of 4/10.
All images from rotten tomatoes