Surprise of the year for me. This is A Quiet Place meets the Happening grounded primarily by Sandra Bullock's performance. It's paced well through a series of flashbacks tied into a single journey but it works really well. John Malkovich also helps drive some tension and panic.
I was thinking A Quiet Place meets The Mist. Maybe some It Comes at Night thrown in. Basically it borrows heavily it's themes from other movies. The only original thing about this movie are the monsters and they are a hard pill to swallow, but for the most part the cast sells it well.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
It definitely needs the the Happening inspiration though. I rather enjoyed the opening quite a bit.
I wasn’t too impressed.
It gets way too hoaky, trying to pull at the heart strings. Towards the end it’s eapecially bad.
Haven’t seen A Quiet Place yet but hoping it’s better.
Props though for crazy dude’s vision of it practically being Cthulhu.
Totally thought that this was The Happening done right.
It works for Bullock and the team inside the house as it's initially happening. The need for food, and never being able to solve the problem was also intriguing to watch. It may not have a completely satisfying ending, but consider me surprised as well.
Bullock and Rhodes are very good in this. Malkovich doesn't have a lot to do but he's a good presence as well. The storytelling however was just too average as far as an apocalyptic nightmare for my tastes. Bier's direction also lacked some intensity for me that I gather other folks are getting somewhere. This could have been much more bizarro and horrifying in the hands of someone like Aronofsky. The ending also stunk and felt cheap- the film overall reminded me of that garbage drama Blindness spliced with The Happening, and while I can't recommend it, it wasn't as painful to get through as some of its cinematic relatives.
I didn't like how this was directed, felt like it could've been a lot more stylish. Also felt that a lot of the dialogue sounded like basic placeholder screenwriting-eese. Bullock holds things together, and a few individual scenes generate suspense. And the survivalism elements hold more interest than the more standard "stick a bunch of assholes in a house" drama. And I'll give the movie credit for saying very little about the threat - there's little real talk about what the entities are, and they're more or less explained on a holistic level, which is nice. But, real talk, a part of me would rather watch The Happening which is "worse," sure, but more interesting in its badnesses than this film is with its decencies/mediocrities. In general, I'm finding less value in evaluating movies as good/bad and get more out of evaluating them as interesting/dull.
Give this to a John Carpenter type and add in a tough-love rewrite, and this coulda been classic.
I wonder what happens to utilities after a year. Water wouldn't be running in those households, and power certainly wouldn't work.
I don’t understand why there are so many “Bird Box’s ending explained!” and “what exactly happened at the end of Bird Box??” articles.
Putting the quality of the movie aside (it’s pure garbage), the ending was completely cut and dry. There was no room at all for interpretation (or misinterpretation) of what happened. Everything was literal.
Why are people so stupid?
You didn't like it fine, but it's not "pure garbage".
I thought it was. It was a bad movie through and through. Sandra Bullock was miscast, everyone else ranges from phoning it in to scenery chewing, it’s never tense let alone frightening. It felt super amateurish and like something made for cable TV.
It just wasn’t a good movie.
Bullock was fine. Who was phoning it in?
John Malcovich seemed bored to be there, and Trevante Rhodes was not good. Tom Hollander as Gary bounced back and forth between campy and embarrassing.
Last edited by megladon8; 01-08-2019 at 10:42 PM.
Malkovich was just fine. If anything, he probably was the most correct out of the group.
The tattooed couple and Lil Rey were forced-obvious Hollywood casting, but meh...
Some of the story beats are pretty dang obvious, and I don't know that I ever really believed the Bullock/Rhodes relationship.
But Bullock shines in this and I like some of the situations that came along, especially the 'possessed' people or whatever they were called.
I didn't mind Hollander. His character shoved the story forward, at least.
The movie should've been much more about the possessed people.
This is honestly just YouTube channels chasing clicks. "Ending Explained" is one of the more common YouTube video essay styles out there, and it's incredibly low-effort, and it yields hundreds of thousands of clicks at times, even when the ending doesn't need any explanation. It's not that people are legit confused by the ending of Bird Box, it's that these channels can convince casual YouTube viewers that maybe there's something they missed by virtue of simply making the video.
Folding Ideas (an actually-good YouTube channel) has a useful discussion/takedown of the practice:
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