With spoilers. But don't deprive yourself of reading it for that. There are no mysteries in this movie.
A priori, the strangest thing about Bird Box is its advertising megacampaña. Loose movies come out every day. Netflix is a specialist in producing them. But let everyone know that there is a new Sandra Bullock movie, that of "blindfold", is what makes it a remarkable event.
Would there be a Bird Box if it had not been successful A quiet place (John Krasinski - 2018)? It is not easy to answer. Most likely, the Bird Box script has been resting in a drawer for years and the algorithm that governs the destinies of the red giant has decided to choose it for production.
Narratively and structurally, Bird Box works as a half-season for The Walking Dead or Falling Skies. Like any standard post-apocalyptic film. Even the disruptive event, suicides induced by some natural (or supernatural, in this case) event, were already in The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan - 2008), perhaps the second worst film by the Hindu master.
Sandra Bullock is Malorie, a pregnant painter, who goes to medical check-up with her sister Jessica - a wasted Sarah Paulson - when a series of mass suicides are triggered in the city. Jessica dies soon and Malorie ends up locked in the shelter-house, with the well-known group of varied features. Suicides are caused by seeing something, that you will never know what it is, but it varies depending on who sees it. There is an important pifie here, which can not be missed. At the beginning, only some can see the entity that causes a hallucination that causes them to commit suicide. A few minutes later, absolutely everyone can hallucinate. All but the spectators, of course.
I'm going to self-test, but you'll know how to apologize. Time is tyrant and similar films. And sometimes it is necessary to copy and paste, instead of writing everything again. A few years ago I wrote an article called The Dead City, in which it said this:
The cinema and the series, following the science fiction masters in their apocalyptic ucronia, have often imagined the end of civilization. The most usual form is the story after the break. The adventures happen in a world that has been devastated for years. The rules have already been rewritten and during the story we discover the new order, at the same time as the characters, or through them. Think of The Road (John Hillcoat - 2009), The Book of Eli (Albert and Allan Hughes - 2010), I am Legend (Francis Lawerence - 2008), including La Jetée (Chris Marker - 1962) and Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds - nineteen ninety five).
A less common aspect is to place ourselves in the zero degree of the debacle. The first Mad Max (George Miller - 1979) placed us in an environment that was disintegrating. The Australian state lost control of the roads, in the hands of gangs, all this based on a crisis due to lack of fuel. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt - 2011) was on a similar path. Looking for a cure for Alzheimer's, a scientist ends up creating a drug that returns to the apes as or more intelligent than humans, initiating the fall of civilization. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón - 2006) poses a world where women cannot get pregnant, the population is getting older and humanity begins the path to extinction.
The clearest example would be the difference between The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, both by Robert Kirkman. In TWD, Rick recovers from the coma, in the Hospital of a small and peripheral city, time after the zombie outbreak, when society has already succumbed. In Fear the Walking Dead we live the outbreak in Los Angeles, the reaction of the government, the small battles that, one by one, are lost until we enter the apocalyptic world.
In the first modality, the apocalypse is a framework; It is a space of action. Condition the situations. Define and model the psyche of the characters. In the second modality, the apocalypse is an essential thread of the plot, for its chronology, and the cause and effect relationship. The rules of the game are written in front of us and the characters learn them at the same time.
End of quote. More than half of the Bird Box belongs to the second subtype. 75% of the film, already quite long with its 124 minutes, happens near the zero degree of the apocalypse. It is very similar to World War Z (Marc Foster - 2013) in that sense. Scriptwriters like to say "start and start". Soon, Malorie, pregnant, is refugee in a house, surrounded by a group of strangers, with different characteristics. This group, or raid, will complement each other to achieve survival. We have the abrupt Douglas (John Malkovich), the gallant Tom (Trevante Rhodes), the solidarity Greg (BD Wong), the old Cheryl (Jackie Weaver), the enlightened Charlie (Lil Rel Howery), the authority Lucy (Rosa Salazar ) and addict Felix (Machine Gun Kelly). Each of them will have a role in the evolution of events.
This “closed space survival group” structure is a genre in itself. He was in El Eternauta (H. G. Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López - 1957). I was in Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero - 1968). Hundreds of stories with multiple variations used this resource: 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg - 2016), The Mist (Frank Darabont - 2007), The Abyss (John Cameron - 1989), and with variations The Purge, The Thing, and many, many more.
These stories always have common events before the end: the learning of the new rules, the exit to look for provisions, anything, from food, water, air, ammunition, energy or medicines. And the knock on the door, in which they must decide whether or not they open. The group will always solve one of these situations badly and this will be the high point of the second act. For these stories to work, they have to have a group of interesting characters. Good dialogues Actors and actresses involved with the book. There has to be tension in the environment. We have to achieve internal tension in the group. That The Walking Dead did well for years. Once protected from the outside world, tension is returned to the interior, to confinement. In this Bird Box fails. We are not interested in these people. We don't empathize with anyone. And we know, because we saw it a thousand times, that Douglas / Malkovich, who is the son of an unfriendly whore, played by someone who already played about 75 sons of unfriendly whores, is right. And we know that they will not give him a ball. And we know that everything is going to go to hell.
Learning is what gives the film its name: the birds perceive the entities. They get frantic and announce their arrival. Survival is achieved by selling your eyes, that is, NOT LOOKING. All this would be enough if it were not for the dissonant factor, present in most apocalyptic stories: the group of misguided humans. In this case, the mentally ill, who love the entity and want everyone to see it. Strangely, these crazy people, escaped from asylum, are able to organize in militias, search, raid houses and force healthy people to see the entity, and therefore commit suicide. Pretty good for people who had eaten porridge with their fingers days before. It is unknown if this capacity is Destructive is induced or not by the entity. Since absolutely everything of the entity is unknown.
I would have added that the movie had a visual idea. The subjective blindfold is a cloth - A PIECE OF FABRIC - on the camera lens. The covered windows do not bring too much interior darkness. To be a film in which it is said that salvation is in NOT seeing, in the shadows, in closing the eyes, it has, notably, a lack of visual imagination that bothers. It is flat and simple. This would be tolerable if, in some way, the plot were exciting. I think that my opinion on that is already clear, but just in case I say it: it is not.
The film is built on two narrative lines. The group past, of which I already wrote, and a shorter line of the present, in which Malorie along with a boy and a girl embark on a boat trip through a dangerous river, blindfolded, to reach a luck of sanctuary. Mecca, big city, protected space, which is also a constant of these films. Traveling with two young children, it would be a rarity of the worst bad milk that did not achieve its purpose. We would be talking about another movie, and this is something that shows from the beginning.
Netflix commissioned this film from Susanne Bier, who had just directed the miniseries The Night Manager (2017), based on the novel by John Le Carré. Previously and among others, Bier directed In a Better World, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film 2011. The script is by Eric Heisserer, responsible for the excellent Arrival (Dennis Villeneuve - 2016) and the correct Lights Out (David Sandberg - 2016 ). I have no answers about what they tried to do with Bird Box, an exhausted movie, which we saw a hundred times, that does nothing or different, or new, or better. A film filmed with blindfold, covered ears and mouth ... let your mouth be pushed aside.