In short: Bird Box (2018)

To nobody’s surprise, it’s the end of the world again. This time around, some apparently rather terrifying things are racing around the world driving most people who see them to suicide. We will later learn that they also drive a small number of people into hunting down the people who somehow have avoided looking at them. Because being down on the mentally ill is always okay (he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm), the film also suggests it is people with mental illnesses thusly susceptible.

We learn all this via flashbacks while following a woman named Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and two little kids apparently named Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) on a blindfolded voyage down a river towards what may or may not be our usual post-apocalyptic sanctuary. So when we don’t have dramatic boating adventures, we witness how the usual rag-tag bunch of survivors (including Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Jacki Weaver) get slowly whittled down to the trio we are flashbacking from.

Turns out, Netflix can make this sort of “serious” Hollywood genre fare as well as the major studios, ending up with a film so riskless and obvious, yet technically very competent, it would have been the lone Oscar nominated movie a couple of years ago, before the Academy realized you might as well nominate good and interesting films beside those trying to be “worthy”. One of the best things among many wonderful things about Black Panther is that it’s not a film designed for Academy nods.

Don’t let my somewhat disgusted tone steer you wrong: director Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic horror film is in all regards perfectly decent or better, and absolutely worth a watch. She’s certainly a very competent filmmaker, and I’d love to see something by her with a more ambitious script. What we get instead is Eric Heisserer using the perfectly wonderful and weird basic idea of the apocalypse from Josh Malerman’s novel for a post-apocalypse by numbers film, with characters only more lively than stock because the cast is really rather good (even Bullock does great work, especially for a woman who can’t move half of her face anymore), and so full of aggressive attempts to make its audience feel feelings I found myself less moved the more the film went out of its way to touch me.

That last aspect of the film is not at all improved by the its treatment of Bullock’s character arc. Not terribly great parenting has apparently caused her to be so emotionally distanced she can’t even (gasp!) look forward to having a child; fortunately, the apocalypse comes along and teaches her the value of motherhood and not giving your children names like “Boy” and “Girl”. The ending’s pretty ridiculous too, with a pat little happy end that fits not at all into what we’ve seen before. Does she name the children when she arrives in Happyland? You betcha! The Babadook, this certainly isn’t.


But honestly, Bird Box is a perfectly watchable, extremely well made film, with a couple of fine suspense sequences, it’s just annoying me righteously with all its gesturing towards a supposed depth it doesn’t actually have.

In short: The Predator (2018)

One of the more puzzling phenomena in mainstream genre cinema is the inexplicable inability of all sorts of filmmakers to understand the core draw of the Predator as very clearly laid out in the first, and hell, even the second movie of what alas has become a franchise of ever repeating mediocrity. If you don’t know (which would make you a Hollywood screenwriter, I guess), the core of the Predator is that he’s hunting the most deadly prey available – usually competent violent action movie machos - while being invisible, creepy, and mysterious, destroying the hubris of competent violent machos even if they should survive the movie at hand.

What Shane Black’s Predator is all about: umm, wacky comedy crazy people, autism as “the next step in human evolution” (because everyone on the Spectrum is a genius Hollywood kid I suppose – insert the sound of a head hitting a desk repeatedly here), some evil government conspiracy whose actions make little sense in connection with their supposed goals, and competent violent machos kicking Predator ass without learning a single thing, even though most of them die. Because it goes with the territory, Black just can’t resist giving the aliens more backstory than they already have, destroying every possibility of them being, you know, alien, or mysterious, or threatening instead of just another CGI monster, while adding some random noise about global warming that has of course no actual point in the script at hand.

Otherwise, the film is all the worst parts of Black’s usual shtick without the good one’s. So everyone speaks exactly the same, which of course is like a potty-mouthed naughty twelve-year old boy who thinks he’s particularly clever, the characters are too thin even for the SF action film with heavy emphasis on the action this is supposed to be, and the plot and its solution are clearly of little interest to anyone involved (or they might have come up with a decent climax or an ending that doesn’t promise the next movie to be Super Sentai Predator). It’s all so perfunctorily done I can’t even enjoy it as cheap pulp SF like Aliens vs Predator.


In short, it’s crap. Let’s not even talk about the charisma free zone that is the film’s so-called “ensemble” of actors, or Black’s bland direction. Sure, the action sequences are competent, but in a film on this budget level, technical competence surely isn’t an achievement deserving praise?