I’m not sure what this movie was about, but I think it’s an allegory about being tricked into watching a movie because everyone is talking about it. It’s on Netflix, which means I’m sure at least one person will go and see it now, muhuhahaha!
I liked it well enough, story is a bit derivative but intriguing, the acting was great, and nicely directed. However, unless theres going to be a Bird Box 2 (and there might be), I feel like there were too many unanswered questions and loose ends for my taste.
You nailed it, especially the first sentence. Good acting but the story was a mishmash of shit. Obviously I can suspend disbelief about the entity but so much of the rest of it was absurd and inconsistent. I didn’t like it at all.
I admit I have not seen the movie, but the book was no better which has me truly confused about the amount of fawning it’s received. Now that I think about it the book really reads like a movie script…
[man enter from left] And now I’m going to KILL YOU ALL! (for some reason)?
I watched it and thought it was pretty good. I like Lovecraftian horror, but most examples of it are a combination of terrible and amateur. This was not a great movie, but it was good and I’m glad I watched it.
I think the idea of being hunted at random by invisible predators is terrifying in as a concept but not yet executed to perfection (see also: Final Fantasy, Spectral). The idea of seeing something so awful that the person is immediately compelled to suicide is also terrifying to contemplate but literally impossible to depict in a movie. Survival horror is also a winner, and they did an okay job of it. In short, I think they could have milked the premises to wring more horror out of it, but they chose not to. That makes me sad.
I agree that many parts of the story were very contrived, but my specific comments will follow in the Spoilers.
The entities are invisible and otherwordly and apparently intangible, but they can’t go inside buildings. WTF? I get that if there was no safe place the movie would be very, very short but still.
Having some people become crazed cultists is a decent Lovecraftian note but was never really exploited. They seemed like a lazy way to circumvent the fact that the entities don’t enter buildings, and move the plot forward,
Gasoline goes bad after a few months. I get that this is a common post-apocalyptic trope, but how do they still have fuel and electricity? (‘Into the Forest’ was more realistic.) Nobody should be driving five-year old cars.
How does she find her way to a boat and the river? And what is the point of the birds? They warn her when the entities come, but we already know they can’t hurt her if she doesn’t look. And if the entities are not around, she still doesn’t think it is safe to look. So it seems kind of pointless.
Okay, so I get that a school full of blind people would be well equipped to survive the entities, but nothing else about the premise makes sense. On the inside, the school is like a fortress or some kind of monastery, and they say they have ample food supplies for dozens of people. That must be one hell of a school.
The most horrible thing in the movie is that Bullock has to choose which of her children will die horribly, so that she and the other child can survive. This is a terrifying thing, but I don’t think they really milked it for all it was worth.
After deciding to risk it, they don’t seem to have much problem navigating the rapids. It reminds me of one of those pitch meetings on Screenrant… “Super easy, barely an inconvenience!” I get that narratively, the whole point was to force an emotional decision and then have the group capsize and split up. But if a blindfolded five-year old can swim to safety, I guess the rapids must not be very dangerous, after all.
I enjoyed it, though I also agree with all the criticism that’s been made here. One thing that stood out - and I almost never comment on this kind of thing - is Sandra Bullock’s makeup.She doesn’t seem like she’s a vain person; I wonder who’s idea it was that she’d have full makeup on the whole time. Again, with all the suspension of disbelief required for this kind of film it’s not exactly the biggest problem, but it seems like we’re getting past the days of actors needing to be in full face paint regardless of the story line. Maybe it was just more obvious because the rest of the cast (aside from hunk, Tom)is very average looking. I enjoyed the fact that is was a realistic mixture of people and not a bunch of white, Hollywood beauties.
Terrible movie, it’s like they just pulled a Frankenstein and stitches together A Quiet Place and The Happening, just unoriginal dreck. And she named the kids boy and girl, give me a fucking break, NOBODY would do that!!!
I told my wife when it ended, “Yeah, the studio that made this was right to sell it to Netflix.” Would have bombed at the box office, but selling to Netflix:
Yes, toss in some elements from The Mist, This is the End, Cell, any zombie apocalypse film, a lot of alien invasion films and The River Wild as well.
We’ve all kind of seen this film before:
Act 1: Meet our troubled protagonists tra-la-laing through their normal life with some vague media reports of “strange happenings” slowly escalating in the background.
Act 2: Oh my God! It’s HERE! AHHHHHH!
Act 3: Welcome to our safehouse full of jerks. You’ll be safe here so long as you don’t look out the window/answer your phone/make noise/turn into a zombie/see the special light/smell alien farts/whatever
Act 4: Slowly our cast is whittled down through the natural attrition of locking a half dozen morons in a house surrounded by danger
Act 5: We have no choice but to journey to the new distant safe house for nice people.
I really enjoyed it. And I cried at the end when the doctor asked what the kids’ names were and they said Boy and Girl and the look of horror at what Molly had done washed over her face. She had to keep them at an emotional distance because to become attached to them, to lose them on top of everyone/thing else, she wouldn’t have been able to handle that too. I could see myself doing the same in a post-apocalyptic scenario because I might just shut down entirely on the inside.
Sure, I had a lot of “Hey, that’s not how that would work” problems, but I was really into it and it scared me enough that I could pretend there weren’t those issues.
My bar for horror movies is pretty low. It’s not pretending to be something it’s not (The Happening) and people were both terrible and good, stupid and smart. Usually movies veer too heavily into one direction and real life is messy. Movies that show messy well gain extra points for me.
I read the book and saw the movie. I wouldn’t say either were OMG YOU HAVE TO READ/SEE THIS but I like them both, and have recommended them to folks.
Maybe this was explained more in the book, but essentially she called them that as a means to not get too attached to them, thinking there was a better-than-average chance they wouldn’t survive. She gives them names at the end, when they get to safety. I thought it was a believable and interesting touch.
