Thinking outside the ‘Bird Box’

Over the last few years, Netflix started issuing statements suggesting that they would begin shifting from predominantly providing content created by other people to predominantly creating content. Many movies and series have been created by Netflix since 2012ish, Stranger Things, Narcos, and House Of Cards have all gotten pretty big.

However, Netflix’s newest film, Bird Box, has seen perhaps the biggest response of anything netflix has done, though nothing from the response or the film can convince me that it is for all the wrong reasons.

Before I can say anything, just know that I did not finish this movie, not out of intervening circumstances, but because I succumbed to the overwhelming urge to do something else.

Bird Box stars Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, Sarah Paulson, BD Wong, and of all possible people, Machine Gun Kelly.

Many people praise Pulp Fiction for it’s dizzying non linear and somehow charmingly forgetful chronology, but Bird Box finds a way to take all of those ingredients and create something truly irrelevant.

Malorie, the protagonist, like many of the foil characters, is disproportionately made up from various travel-worn archetypes. Her rough and tough attitude is kinda half baked into her performance and not explained in the slightest except for an intentionally ambiguous reference to the father of her children. Malorie’s sister’s character is based entirely upon being Malories cure.

The disastrously shallow character development carries all the way until the world ends and we meen John Malkovich for the first time. From then, personalities clash as one would typically expect in an apocalypse as impossible as the one in the movie, and man is it witless.

This goes on until the movie arbitrarily decides to hop between the past and the future. It is at that point that I quit the movie. This movie was so mediocre that I can’t even bring myself to remember how I feel about it. I’m not saying that Bird Box is some kind of cinema abomination but now I know what I’m going to do when I’m in dire straits to fall asleep.