Average, rushed-feeling adaptation of an excellent book

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2018)

OK, so first off - to all of you people going on and on and on about A Quiet Place (which, in itself, was a thoroughly average film with a daft concept full of plot holes), Bird Box - the novel - came first. Josh Malerman's novel came out in 2014, at least a couple of years before Mr Krasinski thought about writing a Quiet Place.
Secondly, this is a thoroughly average, rushed adaptation of a superb novel. The fact that it's rushed tells me that it WAS adapted in response to the success of A Quiet Place.
So much has been changed, from how Mallory's sister dies, to how she discovers she's pregnant, to who the people are in the house she ends up in & when they arrive. And, as is often the place, a lot of it is needless. At times it almost feels as if those doing the adaptation of the novel into a script feel the need to stamp their mark on it. It baffles me that Josh Malerman would be happy with how it's changed.
One of my biggest sticking points was how rushed the arc featuring Gary is. The book is such a slow-burn but much of the best beats are either missing from the film or changed entirely for the sake of it, seemingly. Along with this, the bit about how she teaches 'boy' and 'girl' to tell anything that's around them or what's happening in general is a huge part of the novel, she utterly relies on the kids and their hearing ability, which she trained from birth. We only find this out in the final 15 minutes of the film.
Had it not been an adaptation, it would've been a solid thriller/horror. As an adaptation of one of the most original concepts I've read in a while, it's a huge disappointment.
The name of the director, and a lot of the stars in it means it'll get a lot more leeway than it deserves, much like the above-mentioned A Quiet Place. If it had had a long list of B-actors it wouldn't have been so well-received.