Obviously, in a two-hour movie they can’t possibly explore every possible human behavior or scenario arising from the situation. But one aspect that would have been interesting to explore would be a character or characters giving up.
After a few days, weeks, or months, with little to no hope of the world ever returning to normal, I could definitely see some people saying, “screw this,” and going outside to look, or perhaps taking matters into their own hands and ending it in a less violent manner.
Yes, the film is ultimately about the urge to survive, but I think it would have been rather compelling to see a secondary character take this route, or at least consider it. (In my opinion, the people who died on Day 1 were the lucky ones.)
The more intriguing thing to me would be to do what they did with the neighbor who watched the entity on the security camera but better. They could have totally immobilized him and seen if it wears off and then maybe he is now immune.
The point of the birds is not really to warn about the monsters. The birds can tell the difference between safe and dangerous people.
I found it to be ultimately a waste of my time. Even more so a waste of John Malkovich’s time. Why on earth did they need him for that nothing role?
There was something a bit healing about watching Sandra Bollock face Sophie’s choice and do the right thing. I felt like an old grudge was finally resolved within me.
I thought it was entertaining if a bit cliche. I liked that they didn’t explain everything. You don’t need answers for everything. Especially things the characters wouldn’t ever know. The main character has an arc even if it was a simplistic one. And the type of apocalypse has been done before but it was not something we’ve seen a hundred times. I didn’t feel like my time was wasted.
I finally watched this movie the other day and enjoyed it for what it was. A few have pointed out the “acolytes”. I thought they explained that fairly clearly. I don’t recall whom in the house mentioned the mental hospital patients all becoming acolytes. Then at the supermarket the guy outside is described as being a homeless guy with mental illness who hangs around (or something to that effect). It seemed to me they were fairly clearly providing the context - when people who are mentally ill encounter/see the things, it has a different effect than non-mentally ill who are compelled to kill themselves.
Did they? The scene where the crazy guy gets let into their house - they show him looking at the birds and the birds just chirping normally, they don’t seem very agitated. They definitely didn’t tip them off about that guy.
Speaking of which, that guy ended up being very unique - the rest of the psychopaths could only exhibit very simple behavior. Simply trying to get the victims to look either through convincing or violence. But the guy who Olympia let in gave them a story about how he had himself been on the run from those psychopaths and interacted with them normally to convince them he was a normal person, only to strike later. Without anything being explained, it’s hard to say if this is simply a plot hole where the psychotic people behave inconsistently in a way that’s not justified in the story, or I suppose there’s a range of sophistication in behavior by the psychotic people.
The scene that struck me the most in the movie was kind of low key brutal. As they’re preparing to cross the rapids, she says that she needs one of the kids to volunteer to look. And when her son immediately volunteers, she says “no, no, I’ll decide… uh… uh…” waiting for the little girl to volunteer. Because the boy is her biological son, and she’s pressuring this girl into volunteering to die for both of them because she’s not her kid. That just feels… ugly all around.
Has Stephen King ever written a book with this theme? Where some sort of evil kills if you look at it? It seems like something he could do very well, but the movie adaptation would be blah like Bird Box.
There’s the story “The Mist” which was made into a movie. That wasn’t about something you couldn’t look at, but the characters were all trapped in a store and could not go outside due to a dangerous mist full of deadly creatures. It also started suddenly. So some similarities but not the exact same thing.
The movie was somewhat inconsistent with how it portrayed the creatures. Early in the movie, we have a scene where Mallory is walking away from the raft to a house to get more blankets and food. She has her tether with her, which she ties off in the house. But the tether is tugged on. And when the creature gets to the door, there’s a shadow under the door like it has real presence. There was another scene earlier on, I can’t recall the specifics, where we also saw a shadow under a door from the creatures.
Now I know that’s not the point, and they’re mysterious, but they’re portrayed as invisible things that create little gusts of win at some points, and something that can tug on her tether line and block light coming into a doorway in others.
It’s sort of funny that the movie is called bird box, but the birds in the box had almost no role in the movie. I know there’s a book, so maybe the bird box figured more prominently there?
Literally at no point in the movie did the birds make a difference. Everyone wore a blindfold 100% of the time when they were in danger, and so having an early warning system was irrelevant - they were all prepared as if there was a creature right in front of them at all times.
Even during the supermarket scene, when they figured out the birds might be useful, the guy in the loading dock was already forcing his way out of it and overpowering them, so it wasn’t the birds that tipped them off to something being wrong there. If the birds could’ve sensed crazy cultist people, that would’ve made them useful - but the reason the birds freak out there is because there’s a creature in the loading bay with the guy, they weren’t detecting just the crazy guy, or they’d have detected Gary.
On the other hand, they could’ve used the birds to good effect if they wanted to. We were warned of the presence of the creatures the whole movie by the gust of wind they kicked up. What if they just removed that? Let there be no sign at all that you’re in the presence of a creature… except the birds. The birds would just go wild for no apparent reason, and that would be your cue that the creatures were nearby.
It still ultimately probably wouldn’t matter in that case, since, as I said, people were acting as though they were near the creatures at any time, but it would’ve at least given the bird box a role to play in the movie “bird box”
I didn’t perceive it that way at all. I thought she was just trying to be the adult and force herself to do this awful thing and make Sophie’s choice. I found it enormously satisfying to see her refuse to commit the act. The whole movie to me is about that struggle between being soft and loving on the one hand, and being hard enough to keep them all alive on the other.
There was a theme that she wasn’t as deeply connected to the girl - the girl feared her, rather than loved her. And I think that scene was intentionally shot as I suggest. When her son volunteers, she immediately dismisses it, and then basically waits for the girl to volunteer. The girl gets a look over her face of understanding and pain, knowing why Malory is waiting for her to “volunteer”
But then Mallory has a change of heart, when she decided she was unwilling to ask the girl to make that sacrifice, is indeed as you say. The way she talks to the girl after they become separated in the woods shows that she came to realize that she hadn’t been as connected to the girl as the boy, but now she realizes that they’re both her children.
But her initial plan was to force the girl into looking because she wasn’t willing to risk her son. The realization and change of plans came immediately after that.