Effective but not consistent enough

Rating: 6/10 (22 December 2018)

Bird Box isn't that amazing as its trailer and premise appeared to be. Don't know the book, never heard of it in fact, but I guess that, like all book adaptations, it may be more coherent on its narrative when the movie is not.
Sandra's acting is flawless, an Oscar performance for sure if the movie was better developed and with a wider theater release. It's amazing how she's getting better and better on each new movie. So, about that, no complains. She holds the movie entirely by her own, the same way she did with The Blind Side and Gravity. She's compelling since the first minutes, when the camera captures her minor mixed emotions while she prepares the kids for their blindfolded journey.
Surely the movie starts strong. It's shocking how things happen, in a very impressive way as in World War Z. I mean, it's believable in its fiction. The crazyness afflicting people on the streets were terrifying. The beginning of the movie have some resemblances to the beginning of The Last Of Us game too, plus all the emotional rollercoaster of fear it provides.
But when the story clearly divides itself between present and past, seems to me that the flashbacks doesn't do what it really should. Instead, flashbacks are there because the story couldn't hold itself only in the present and the difficulties to cross miles in the woods blindfolded with 2 kids.
It's so that way that the present time is always boring, lacking of hard obstacles and unpredictable enemies as people may expect. The direction isn't all that good too. The camera never delivers a desperate or claustrophobic feeling of the unseen. Director Susanne Bier opens the camera too much to show every step taken by the characters didactically, instead of doing the contrary, because most of the movie should be developed around senses, which is not, and very frustrating in that aspect. The sound could do so much more like it does in The Blair Witch, for example. A movie where characters are not blindfolded, but have no vision in the dark, making audience experience with them the terror of listening things, but never seeing them.
The supporting characters are all one dimensional, and their fate in the story is predictable as hell. Even when they could have been better played over the aspects of doubt, if that character should or shouldn't be trusted, the screenplay fails terribly and shamefully.
Plot holes are all around because the writers explain nothing about anything. There's just this imagination surrounding what's happening all the time. Malorie, for example... We can imagine that she has some social difficulties, some traumas or relationship problems with others, but we never know exactly why. Why is she going further with an unpleasant pregnancy? Why is she isolated in her home? Does she have been thru a sexual violence in the past? Only questions... Never answers.
The same about the unseen enemy. What is it in fact? An alien? A disease? Or just an unexplainable collective madness? Why some people can adapt to it and some cannot? Why was Jessica affected and Malorie was not?
Ok, I hate movies that explains everything, but here they never do it even with the basics necessary to immerse audience into the story.
We have no need to see or know what the enemy is, but we should had a moment in a victim's eyes to at least know why the despair takes them so deeply. What is that they see? Their worst fears? Their worst version of themselves? The horrors of the past or future? Why some of them claim it to be be beautiful?
So, for me, the movie is only interesting because of Sandra's acting, and because most of the time it delivers what it promisses, even if superficially, but it does. There are thrilling and impressive scenes that will make audience so desperate and affraid as the charcaters are, but that's all. Effective, but not consistent as it should.
Sometimes seems a waste of great ideas because the experience could be much more explored, but entertaining if you don't take it that seriously, even if the ending is too simple for all the post apocalyptical circus that was promoted.