01/06/2019
RICH POLK's BLOG:
Netflix thrust Bird Box before me and encouraged me to watch it. [Spoiler Alert: Elements of the plot will be revealed, but the purpose of this blog is to suggest the story was already spoiled by the author(s). (Novel by: Josh Malerman, Screenplay: Eric Heisserer)] Sandra Bullock’s acting of late has been good, so I gave it a shot. Once again, Hollywood has disappointed.
For me, science fiction requires an initial gulp of an incredible given. In Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it was an amazing (for its time) submarine. In Bird Box, it’s an invisible but shadowy cloud that’s sweeping across the world, which, when viewed either with the naked eye or via a television camera, causes the viewer to become instantly suicidal. Once that gulp is swallowed, it is near impossible to swallow anything else incredulous. How are the characters—usually mere mortals--going to respond to this unknown extraordinary phenomenon and how will they be affected? THAT is the story. If their umbrellas enable them to fly away like Mary Poppins or they can wiggle their nose and alter the world à la I Dream of Jeannie, then the reader/viewer is shortchanged. For the story to be worthy, the protagonists must function in the world as we know it, beyond the incredible given, of course.
Serious writers face these concerns every day—and not just in science fiction. “She wouldn’t do that” or “he couldn’t do that” are realizations that stop us short and cause us to re-think. The writers of Bird Box faced no such inhibitions. The inconsistencies range from the incredulous to the hilarious.
Much of the story takes place five years after the apocalypse. Five years are needed to give the heroine’s newborn son and adopted daughter time to reach an age where they can assist in a perilous blindfolded voyage down a rapids-laced river and when they can and will do stupid and potentially dangerous things. For those five years, the heroine, her circumstantial lover named Tom, and the aforementioned kids, have lived shut up inside a refuge house, occasionally venturing out blindfolded on foraging missions. The four are what’s left of the initial refugees, the other less than a dozen having been picked off one by one in classic horror movie style.
To make the challenges of the river voyage even more insurmountable, Tom must die. To kill him, the writers recruit a gang of roving hoodlums living off the land traveling around in two muscle cars. They all have fi****ms, of course, but Tom is able to neutralize all of them while blindfolded, even if he does so after receiving his fatal wound. But wait! The gang does not wear blindfolds. Why not? In five years of marauding, they never encountered the deadly wind that has depopulated California and beyond?
And then there’s those muscle cars. Something as non-apocalyptic as Hurricane Sandy or the blizzards of 1993 taught us how fragile the gasoline supply chain can be. But these hunters zoom around without a worry. They must frequent the same service stations as the characters of Water World (co-written by Peter Rader and David Twohy). In that film, a world flooded by melted ice caps presents no challenges to oil exploration, refinement, and distribution, considering how jet skis roam the high seas. Except for some dirt and grime (there aren’t any car washes, silly!), the Bird Box vehicles run like tops. We are to believe that one or more of these slope-headed murderers are capable car mechanics even as the drivers abuse the vehicles, cutting donuts in the gravel driveway.
Stock prices for Duracell and Eveready should plummet, given the life expectancy of batteries in this movie. In real life, the range of the little FM walkie-talkies the batteries power is challenged by the dimensions of a shopping mall. In the movie, however, they are good for better than one hundred miles, as a 2 mph current would carry our heroine that far in forty-eight hours, even if she weren’t rowing, which she was.
The writers need the radios, though. With Tom dead, our super-independent heroine artist and feminist poster girl must now find others, even if she and two five-year-olds must brave a raging river while sightless. A radio transmission gives her the vague clues as to where to aim her rowboat and, presumably, where to drag their soaked bodies out of the stream. The clever little twist at the end is not worth all the nonsense embraced to get there. Making it worse, the parakeets that are boxed and carried along—presumable because of their canary-in-a-mineshaft ability to foretell danger—do nothing to aid the trio, but rather, unbelievably survive a prolonged dunking in the river themselves. And the birds are featured in the title of the novel and the movie!
Perhaps for comic relief, Tom and the family sit and relish a five-year old Pop Tart they find in an abandoned kitchen. This is stretching the limits of believability too far. A five year old Twinkie—maybe. A Pop Tart? No chance.
As watchers of movies and readers of books, we must demand more of authors and screenwriters. To fail to do so will doom us to more non-entertaining entertainment hours and doom our culture to the product of lazy writers.
–Rich Polk
