Tag: Tom Hollander

What’s In the Box?! (Bird Box, 2018)

bird_box_posterOne day, the monsters arrived.  People seem to be taken by a force and then kill themselves. If that sounds familiar, you actually remember 2008 M. Night Shyalaman film the Happening.  That film had people committing violent suicides and people trying to flee the city and solve the mystery.  The twist was that it was the trees that did us in.

Oh, sorry…spoilers.

The Happening is (for good reasons) not fondly remembered. It does have a couple very well done freaky moments. But it just becomes laughable.

Here, the problem is that…well…if you see the monsters…you are toast. And so, the only way to survive is to keep your eyes closed. For artist Malorie, this situation is even more troubling as she is pregnant.

Malorie soon joins a group of survivors in a house. Blocking the windows, they find themselves finding inventive ways to survive. But as the months tick by, they find that they must take bigger and bigger risks.

The film is focused on Malorie and her children and her detachment from life. The children are born after the event and simply named Boy and Girl.  The three are trying to take a boat down river to a sanctuary. Using flashbacks, we get to see how the relationships within the house grow and break down…where trust becomes hard to come by.

The “keep your eyes closed” part is the most gimmicky, and yes, does evoke last year’s wonderful a Quiet Place. Unlike a Quiet Place, we do not share in the characters’ experience. With Bird Box, although there are a few brief moments seen through the blindfolds of characters, the camera remains in third person.  Admittedly, forcing us to be blind whenever the characters are would get pretty obnoxious.

One of the really nice tricks is the film never tells us what the monsters are. We know people see them and then also seem to see loved ones… but we only see or hear the effects of their movement, not the creatures themselves.  There are some really interesting artist renderings at one point, but really, who knows if this is really what the creatures look like or merely what the artists saw in their heads.

Bird Box is, thankfully, a much more effectively done take on a general idea like the Happening.  The film has a really good cast and some really effective sequences.

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Yo Ho Ho, It is OVER! (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, 2007)

Pirates_of_Caribbean_Worlds_End_PosterHoly. Crap.  THIS. MOVIE. IS. SO. LONG.

Like, super long. It is ten minutes shy of three hours.

Anyhoo, picking up where the last film left off, the Kraken ate Jack Sparrow and now Elizabeth Swann, Will Turner and Barbossa are trying to rally the troops to find and return Jack from Davey Jone’s locker so they can stop Davey Jones.

And this ends up taking over an hour.  We see Sparrow in the afterlife and boy is he bored.  And frankly?  So was I.  This sequence is just excruciatingly long.  There are so many subplots, it just gets tiring and uninspired.  I found myself constantly wondering about how much longer we had to go.

The films seem to want to position Jack as some magical key to the universe, rather than some lucky idiot.  But really, the whole lunatic rockstar thing is wearing thin at this point.  If you cut about an hour of the film or a little more, this might be a lean and fun adventure.  Instead it makes the the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King look sleek.

Filmed back to back with Dead Man’s Chest, At World’s End tries be a massive epic, but it really only accomplishes feeling ridiculously bloated.

The visuals are quite good, as are the action scenes.  But the road the story takes is so meandering as it is hard to not get bored through great portions of this film.

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Yo Ho Ho! Let’s Go For Another Ride! (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, 2006)

Pirates_of_Caribbean_Dead_Mans_Chest_Poster“Abandon Ship, or Abandon Hope”, declares Kevin McNally’s Gibbs. Disney was full of hope they had a franchise after the hit of Curse of the Black Pearl. To make sure they could recapture the magic, they kept on the director, writing team and…of course… Johnny Depp and Captain Jack Sparrow.

Will and Elizabeth are engaged, Norrington has left the British Navy and now a bigger threat has arrived.  A man who seeks to destroy the Pirate Scourge.  His first act is to arrest both Will and Elizabeth, though this is a trap to try and force their hand in locating Jack Sparrow.  Who they want because they believe he holds the key to a bigger weapon against all pirates.

Jack Sparrow is finding himself trying to avoid a debt to Davey Jones (who gave him the Black Pearl to captain for thirteen years, even if Barbossa took over a mere two years into the deal). He must serve 100 years upon Jone’s ship the flying Dutchman which ferries those who die at sea to the afterlife.  Bootstrap Bill (Will Turner’s Father) comes to warn Sparrow that his time is up.  But when Davey Jones sends his leviathan beast after Jack, they decide to beach the ship and hide on an island.

Will Turner is searching everywhere for Jack, but the best people seem to be able to do is say where they heard he was headed.  He discovers the shipwrecked boat on a remote island and encounters Jack and the Black Pearl crew. They meet with witch Tia who tells them of a way to defeat Davey Jones, the cursed captain of the Flying Dutchman. Setting out to find the heart of Davey Jones, the crew re-unites, including Elizabeth Swann and the disgraced Norrington.

While Will and Elizabeth are played up to be the thread for the series, Jack Sparrow was the standout character for audiences in the first film, so the writers make sure we got a lot more Jack.  Elizabeth is gone from the film for a good forty-five minutes, stuck in a prison cell. She is relegated to the prize that drives Will, which is rather unfortunate.  Once she joins back up with the crew, she becomes much more active.

The visual design of the film is terrific.  As with the Curse of the Black Pearl, we have cursed pirates, but this time they are more elaborate.  Jones and his crew are connected to the sea so intensely, that they are blended with sea creatures.  Jones’ head is an octopus, with his tentacles serving as a beard.  Bill Nighy is terrific in the role, giving a darkly comic performance.

The film actually brings back almost the entire surviving cast, and everyone seems rather comfortable in their skins.  The film has a lot of fun action sequences and of course many, many narrow escapes.  But the extra focus on Jack also starts to run the risk of making the character more annoying than amusing.  The film also is starting to try and set up an “epic” tale thing for Will, Elizabeth and really Jack.  One character even notes that Will has the air of “destiny” about him.

This film is a lot of fun for the most part, and I would say it comes out pretty favorably in relationship to the first film.

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