Bird Box: An Insult to the Thriller Genre

Rating: 1/10 (23 February 2020)

When Bird Box first hit the scene in 2018, its online presence was hard to miss. Twitter quips, memes, and passionate testimonials to the greatness of the film soon surfaced, with some arguing that Sandra Bullock's performance would merit an Oscar nomination. Naturally, with the excitement surrounding the film, I was interested to see just how thrilling, emotional, and eventful it would be. Instead, I found myself in complete shock that anyone could posit that this film is anything more than a flaming, festering dumpster fire. Read on for my take on what I believe to be the worst film of 2018.
(If you don't want to read the entire review, scroll to the bottom to read my summarized critique!)
***WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW***
From the start, this movie is a total disaster. The way the film jumps back and forth between timelines is enough to give viewers whiplash, and it does so in a way that is completely in your face. Due to this, any ounce of nuance or suspense is gone from the start, giving way to a bland, boring, and predictable storyline.
The characters and their motivations are incredibly muddled throughout the story, specifically those of Bullock's character Malorie, Danielle Macdonald's character Olympia, and John Malkovich's character Tom. As these characters and others are relegated to a home in order to stay safe from the invisible "monsters", their relationships sway ridiculously between being friends and enemies.
The plot continues on to see the characters driving blindly to the grocery store (which somehow works despite the fact that there should be bodies and debris all over the road), fending off the mosters as they invade the home (managing to do so with few casualties), and Malorie and her children blindly canoeing down a treacherous river to find an entire commune of blind people who somehow managed to escape the monsters. Obviously this is a work of fiction, but this film pushes fiction to the extreme in the worst way possible.
Moving on, the screenwriting and dialogue of the film was cringeworthy at best, with the characters communicating in an incredibly forced and unnatural way. I found Olympia to be particularly obnoxious and one-sided, and did not feel a bit of sadness when she died (due to her own ignorance, no less). That said, Malorie was arguably more frusturating, as the complete apathy she displayed throughout the film felt formulaic and obligatory. The very fact that she named her children "Boy" and "Girl" was so cheesy it hurt, and her willingness to consider sacrificing "Girl" towards the end of the film obliterated any degree of reality the screenwriters attempted to convey.
What more can I say? This film is one of the worst I've ever seen, and upon second and third viewings I can confirm that it only gets more dreadful with time. I feel strongly that Bird Box will age about as well as an egg left out in the sun, rotting and festering with each passing moment. Utterly ghastly, this film is an insult to the genre it claims to represent.
TL;DR:
The Good: The birds were cute, I guess? I am genuinely struggling to find a single positive thing to say about this film.
The Bad: Would it be unfair to say that everything about this movie is bad? The acting, the screenwriting, the directing, the cinematography, etc. etc. etc... Everything about this film is vapid, unintelligent, and monotonous.
The Ugly: If I had to pick the very worst thing about this film, it would have be the plot. Awful is an understatement. The choices the characters make throughout are both incredibly senseless and incredibly predictable, a nasty combo. For this reason and so many others, I genuinely feel that the film itself is an insult to the thriller genre as a whole. In a genre that is already so oversaturated with disappointing films, this one manages to stand out as one of the worst, a difficult title to attain when the bar is already set so low.