WORTH ALL THE HYPE?
I am admittedly weird. My friends know I am weird. My family knows I am weird. But I don’t think my brother realized just how weird I really am until I admitted that I do not (insert gasp) have a Netflix account. Now, understand that while I love to watch TV and films, my not having Netflix is a conscious decision. Simply put, if I had it, I would watch it.
All. The. Time. And so, when I started to hear the buzz about this new flick called, Bird Box, I just had to check it out. And thanks to my brother, I was able to do so.
Now, About the movie: I appreciated the (somewhat) uniqueness of it.
While it is definitely not the worst movie I have ever seen, I don’t know about all the hype.
Having been an avid horror fan since childhood, I am extremely critical of horror films and I, quite honestly consider myself an expert.
Now, I say somewhat unique because I definitely saw influences from Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. I also saw comparisons to M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, The Happening.
All three deal with a post-apocalyptic world. And in my personal opinion all three also deal with the consequences of trashing the planet. Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road deals with an unspecified catastrophic event that occurred which has destroyed the planet as we know it. With Bird Box, a supernatural element is the culprit. In a nutshell, you don’t want to play the eye game with these demons/entities, because if you do, they compel you to check yourself out and commit suicide (hello M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 movie, The Happening). But instead of a killer fern, we are dealing with some kind of deadly Casper! The underlying theme here is this. We suck. We (people) pretty much destroy everything, and Mother Earth is pissed. She needs a reset: be it through a cataclysmic event, killer plants, or demons.
Additionally, there are (at least, I think so) nod’s to a little known show called, The Walking Dead (also about a post-apocalyptic world, via zombies). It seems a bit coincidental to me that the blind hero of the day (Pruitt Taylor Vince) plays a character named Rick (the name of the not so long ago hero on TWD) who also previously played a character named Ottis on TWD.
And, (maybe it’s jyst me) I also personally see a little bit of 1997’s The Blair Witch Project here as well. Just like in Blair Witch, the demon/entity is never seen. We see leaves floating, we see dark shadows, but Casper never makes a legit appearance. And yet, it works I think.
Really good performances by Sandra Bullock and my boy John Malcovich add to the film as well.
Overall, I’m not mad at it.
All. The. Time. And so, when I started to hear the buzz about this new flick called, Bird Box, I just had to check it out. And thanks to my brother, I was able to do so.
Now, About the movie: I appreciated the (somewhat) uniqueness of it.
While it is definitely not the worst movie I have ever seen, I don’t know about all the hype.
Having been an avid horror fan since childhood, I am extremely critical of horror films and I, quite honestly consider myself an expert.
Now, I say somewhat unique because I definitely saw influences from Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. I also saw comparisons to M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, The Happening.
All three deal with a post-apocalyptic world. And in my personal opinion all three also deal with the consequences of trashing the planet. Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road deals with an unspecified catastrophic event that occurred which has destroyed the planet as we know it. With Bird Box, a supernatural element is the culprit. In a nutshell, you don’t want to play the eye game with these demons/entities, because if you do, they compel you to check yourself out and commit suicide (hello M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 movie, The Happening). But instead of a killer fern, we are dealing with some kind of deadly Casper! The underlying theme here is this. We suck. We (people) pretty much destroy everything, and Mother Earth is pissed. She needs a reset: be it through a cataclysmic event, killer plants, or demons.
Additionally, there are (at least, I think so) nod’s to a little known show called, The Walking Dead (also about a post-apocalyptic world, via zombies). It seems a bit coincidental to me that the blind hero of the day (Pruitt Taylor Vince) plays a character named Rick (the name of the not so long ago hero on TWD) who also previously played a character named Ottis on TWD.
And, (maybe it’s jyst me) I also personally see a little bit of 1997’s The Blair Witch Project here as well. Just like in Blair Witch, the demon/entity is never seen. We see leaves floating, we see dark shadows, but Casper never makes a legit appearance. And yet, it works I think.
Really good performances by Sandra Bullock and my boy John Malcovich add to the film as well.
Overall, I’m not mad at it.
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