You never know what's going to connect with the zeitgeist of American culture. It's obvious that as a world superpower, the United States is working through the various stages of decline into a significantly less powerful nation. It's not the end of the world, it's just something that happens to empires. Empires are unsustainable, and none of them have ever lasted for more than a few hundred years.
Where are they now? The empires of Sumeria, Akkadia, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, China, Mongolia, the Ottomans, Great Britain, and Japan? Most are forgotten outside of a college Ancient History course. China, Japan, and Britain are all economic powers, but they hardly match the scope of their imperial days. The American Empire is falling apart as well, both internally and internationally, and the culture of American entertainment reflects this accordingly.
So it's not really a surprise that another end-of-the-world supernatural thriller like Netflix's Bird Box has captured the imagination of millions here at Christmastime in Trump's hate-and-rage-filled America. It's a hyper-violent suspense thriller with good acting by a talented cast. It's also completely undeserving of high acclaim due to yet another terrible, lazy, ridiculous script. It's as if since Carrie Fisher died, the entire profession of "script doctor" in Hollywood has died with her.
If you haven't seen the movie yet, and you want to, do not let my criticism deter you. My family and friends who have seen it have truly enjoyed it. For me, it was a serviceable (albeit slow and completely predictable) piece of throwaway entertainment. But I'm going to spoil the shit out of everything, so please, if you're planning on watching it, stop reading, and don't come back until you've seen it.
So, what's my beef? Plenty...
Apocalypse By-the-Numbers Plot
Stop me if you've seen this...an unexpected global catastrophe kills billions of people worldwide, ending organized, technological civilization as we know it. Our main character manages to join forces with a few survivors—most of whom represent factions of the culture who hate each other (e.g. a black guy and a racist white prick)—to try to figure out how to steer clear of the catastrophe as well as the danger posed by other survivors (most of whom are psychotic murderers...evidently Sunday School teachers have a low survivability rate). The decision is made to try to travel to a location that is supposed to be safe from catastrophe and vicious survivors, but of course, the journey is fraught with all kinds of peril. One by one, our survivor group dies off, until only the protagonist and maybe one or two others finally make it to safety (or find out safety no longer exists). These plot points are as predictable and regular as the outline for a Greek tragedy, and no movie is more by-the-numbers in this way than Bird Box. It's as original as a box of corn flakes. I knew exactly what was going to happen long before it happened; there were no surprises to be found.
Boring, Two-Dimensional Characters
This is Fiction Writing 101, people. You have to give your audience a reason to care about your characters. Bird Box gets by almost exclusively on Sandra Bullock's popularity and personality. I think Bullock is wonderful in just about everything she's ever been in. Here, I never knew who her character was supposed to be. Okay, she's an artist, but that doesn't affect her character in any way. Many character points are alluded to—she and her sister don't get along with her mother, Bullock's baby daddy is out of the picture, she's worried about being a mother—but they don't inform us about who these people are in any way other than keeping score. I found Bullock's character to be such a cipher that I wasn't emotionally invested in whether she lived or died. The other characters are mere cardboard cutouts of the actors who play them. Sarah Paulson is acerbic, John Malkovich is loud and angry, and the others (lady cop, punky white guy, chubby black nerd, hunky black dude, gay Asian) are stereotypes taken straight from the diversity plot wheel. Bullock's children are literally named "Boy" and "Girl," a projection of how generically these characters are developed.
What the Fuck is Killing Everybody?
When your main point of conflict is a fucking Macguffin, I must conclude that you're too goddamned lazy to write a compelling story. The Nerd gives us a perfunctory explanation of what it might be, but it's the last word. The catastrophe is driven by an invisible entity that causes humans who look upon it to immediately kill themselves (in the most violent and horrible ways possible, of course). Why? For what purpose? Some humans don't die, however. Those who are mentally ill worship the entity and travel around forcing others to look, which almost always results in that person's death by suicide. To make things even more fucking stupid, this entity, which has the power to turn a normal human mind suicidally insane, cannot enter a human-made building. Are you kidding me? Do you have any other idiotic plot holes for me to drive a Sherman Tank through? How about if those who are just neurotic, but not fully psychotic, don't commit suicide but are overcome by an overwhelming urge to disco dance? That would make just about as much sense. It's not "cool" to create a deadly entity and never explain it; it's just a lazy, undeveloped idea. And yeah, this movie is based on a book, and the entity isn't explained in the book, either. That makes this whole thing doubly lazy.
Five Years Later? Bitch, please...
I suppose I should blame AMC's The Walking Dead for this, as two years into a zombie apocalypse, yards are still mowed and trimmed and houses are intact, but it's even worse in Bird Box. Five years later, everything inside and outside looks exactly the same. Most houses are intact, and in the most ridiculous scene of the movie, Bullock and her partner, Tom (Trevante Rhodes), scavenge a house and find a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts...and they eat them! And the kids smile at their first taste of strawberry! Are you fucking serious, people? A simple Google search will tell you that Pop-Tarts are edible from no more than 6-12 months past their sell-by date. Five years later, assuming they hadn't been scavenged by animals, they would have been completely inedible and probably cause for food poisoning. I almost stopped watching the movie at this point. Also, take a look at just one episode of the History Channel's wonderful series Life After People to see just how quickly nature takes over human constructions after we leave. This website details what happens in just a few years to an abandoned home. It's an unforgivable sin of writing to not include details that can be discovered in less than a minute with a simple Internet search.
I Can't See Where I'm Going!
Bullock and Rhodes are contacted by walkie-talkie by Rick, who gives them directions to the safe sanctuary. I'm not going to fuss about batteries, since they do have a shelf-life of 5-10 years, but I am going to gripe about where this sanctuary is located. It's in the middle of fucking nowhere, so much so that it's only accessible by a dangerous river journey and then a walk through the woods (woods where, mind you, there are clear and open paths for Bullock and her children to walk along, because nothing grows in these kinds of movies) to get to a school for the blind, a convenient place to be, since sighted people must wear blindfolds outside to avoid the entity, which only has power over the sighted. I guess supernatural murder abilities don't extend to hearing or telepathy. Again, when you don't explain the power at work, that's a gigantic plot hole. Can someone please explain to me why a school for the blind would be so absolutely inaccessible? It seems that it would need to be especially easy for people to find, seeing as they are BLIND! Let's add to the stupidity that the river journey goes through rough rapids that require someone to take off their blindfold and look outside, which is the one thing that will FOR SURE kill your ass dead. Since Pop-Tarts are still good, I'm going to assume cell phones and GPS systems are still functional, too. Just give me your address and I'll walk there.
Shut the Fork Up!
I've intentionally laced this post with profanity, including the ever-versatile "fuck" in several places to make a couple of different points. First, I'm no shrinking violent when it comes to vulgar language. In fact, most of my friends, especially those from college, would tell you that if there was a Mount Rushmore for foul language, I'd be immortalized in stone. But here's the rule I follow in my own writing as well as advice I give to others: don't use it unless you have to. If you can take it out, and the sentence still has the same meaning and emotional effect, then take it out. It makes the times that you use it so much more impactful. Netflix, being immune from FCC regulations, uses it so gratuitously at times that it becomes monotonous. Also, real-life people (outside of junior high boys) don't talk this way. Yes, we curse and use profanity, just not seven times in every sentence. Once again, it's lazy writing that supposedly instills "street cred" in a story or makes it sound tough. It's not. It's boring, and it tells me that you don't have anything more clever to say. Aaron Sorkin knows how to use profanity properly. Watch this clip from HBO's The Newsroom. Jeff Daniels only uses three curse words, but look at the emotional power they generate. This is how it should be done. I'm not calling for no profanity...I'm asking for smarter, more intelligent profanity.
So what's the final verdict?
Look, most of the people I know really liked Bird Box. I consider it a C-minus at worst, a C-plus at best. I'd probably watch it again if a close friend who hadn't seen it wanted me to watch it with him or her. It's not a terrible way to spend a couple of hours, but it's also indicative of how entertainment could be so much better if writers, directors, and producers would take the time to think about the script in a critical way and fix these systemic defects before they make it onto the screen. As a writer, I would have demanded so much more of myself than to turn in a script with this many obvious problems. And you can't blame the streaming services, either, because Amazon Prime gave us The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is one of the best-written, smartest, funniest, and most linguistically fucking profane shows in recent memory. Print may be dying, but good writing never goes out of style.
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