Overrated, ambiguously structured, easy Hitchcock

Rating: 5/10 (21 September 2016)

This is a great opportunity to state that Hitchcock was really more of a great/legendary businessman than he was a great director. He never wrote any of the films he worked on, but knew how to spot and exploit a story with cinematic potential. There isn't so much an artistic style to his films as there is a know-how stamp or signature.
This here is yet another Hitchcock film, one more down the conveyor belt of prolific industrial mainstream production.
We're given a long narrative in the first part between basically one man and a woman, with the typical bit of mystery that always starts off the Hitchcock films. This would all turn out to be quite vain when we understand what the film really is about: exactly what the title suggests. It seems wasteful to have spent that much time developing so much story and intrigue in human relationship so far-removed from what this film ultimately becomes, and is as a horror concept.
There isn't an interesting thought or a subtle reason behind the strange happenings and every scene is more linear development in the bird catastrophe and never does the movie attempt to create a symbol or hidden/double meaning out of this. This is just cheap 60's horror, with strawman characters and moments that are today absolute clichés of the genre - and whether it was impressive visually for its time is absolutely irrelevant today, and additionally there's a terrible lack of attention to detail: all the scenes where they're outside where the birds are, forget to close doors despite the wind of chaos, etc etc...
The fact there isn't music in key moments was nice, but terribly thin as an excuse to call this a cinematic masterpiece. This is another by-the-numbers lazy Hitchcock marketing/business idea, and once again he'd achieved undeserved recognition for a highly, highly overrated piece. A very lucky, right man in the right place character, Alfred Hitchcock, with an eye and a mind to seize the opportunity, and juice it.