Bird Box Review: 4 Ups & 4 Downs
2. It's Surprisingly Generic
Though an end-of-the-world movie with a cast this talented and a director this acclaimed certainly invites high expectations, it'll be surprising to those unfamiliar with the source material just how samey, even generic the movie feels overall.
So many more creative and interesting things could be done with this concept, but instead, characters are mostly thinly-drawn stereotypes, especially John Malkovich's selfish prick Douglas, who plays exactly the type of character you'd expect Malkovich to play without any deviation whatsoever.
There's a scene early in this movie where Lil Rel Howery's character rattles off a list of explanations for the apocalypse that he read on Wikipedia, and it plays out like the perfunctory, formulaic dialogue you'd expect to hear in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.
The A-to-B-to-C plotting is for the most part intensely predictable, and if you've seen your share of post-apocalyptic thrillers, you won't find much here to be surprised by.
Hell, even the musical score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross feels oddly workmanlike, which given their wonderfully evocative, dynamic work on David Fincher's movies is extremely disappointing, if also aptly emblematic of the entire project.
Despite having so much going for it - most of all a neat-as-hell premise - Bird Box sadly doesn't do a whole lot new.