December 2009
<< Back

The Box (12a)
Printed 2nd December 2009

Based on a Twilight Zone TV episode entitled Button, Button that itself was based on a Richard I Am Legend Matheson short story first published in Playboy in June 1970, Richard Kelly’s The Box continues his legacy of filmic nonsensical noodle-bakers.

Just take a look at his track record: his lauded and much-loved (massively overrated in my humble) time travel, tangent universe and predestination paradox-toying debut Donnie Darko was followed by the fractured-narrative, incongruent-to-reality screenplay for Tony Scott about the stranger-than-fiction real life of bounty hunter Domino Harvey that hardly anyone rated (wrongly in my humble) before he almost committed career-suicide with the critically-derided, massively-flawed, sprawling mess of a movie Southland Tales (that I still don’t know how to value in my humble. Except for...whisper it...being better than Donnie). Utter bonkers. All of ‘em.

Now this. Which in order to pad out to feature-length carries on where the Twilight Zone episode left off (the pressing of the button, the delivery of the money and the steward’s ominous departing shot: “I can assure you it will be reprogrammed and passed onto someone you don’t know”) by entering Richard Ke-la-la-land where there is no narrative flow or sense of how scenes fit together in order to tell a cohesive story.

The Box’s premise is fairly simple. A down-on-their-luck married couple (a weak James Marsden and worse Cameron Diaz) receive a strange wooden box with a bright red button. Visited by the mysterious Arlington Steward (Frank Langella complete with really bad CGI half-face - see above) soon after, they are informed that if they choose to press the red button they will receive one million dollars (this is set in 1976 so adjust for inflation). However it comes at a price, as someone they don’t know will die as a consequence. So set in motion is a morality tale. What would you do?

The Box’s execution is fairly amateur however. Kelly’s original script concepts – post-halfway, post-Matheson – is a total disconnected mess of “out there”, supposedly revolutionary ideas that don’t mesh at all well with the retro 70s paranoid-style of movie-making and period setting. Moreover, they are frequently laughable in their ambition. Once again it just seems as if he’s recorded his stream of consciousness on celluloid with little rhyme or reason for the why, what, where, who or how. Whole chunks of the unravelling bizarre events go unexplained or unacknowledged in a way that just isn’t acceptable. And I’m an unapologetic Lost fan, but this is really something else. In a car crash one scene then walking out of a Close Encounters-lit warehouse the next with armed guards flanking your position? Huh? Dramatically told your decisions may have ramifications for the rest of mankind one scene and then casually walking into your home with your wife the next? Wha? Stepping into an Abyss knockoff watery cuboid one scene then transported to be floating above your wife laying on your bed and being released by her fingerprick as if trapped in a bubble that proceeds to flood the entire room? C’MON!?!?!?! Seriously. No discussion about these events whatsoever!?

What happened with Southland's weird Tales was that the high production values and consummate acting on-display (not to mention the alternate reality setting) helped to distract from all this. Unfortunately the same can’t be said here. Admittedly there is attention-to-period-detail in the props and costumes and haircuts and jazzy wallpaper. Shame there wasn’t to shot composition, CGI quality, lighting, editing or acting calibre (Diaz is just horrible). I don’t know whether it’s all meant to be part of the Twilight Zone aesthetic but it doesn’t work. It just looks cheap and poorly thought out and poorly executed and poorly rendered.

It’s a shame because there are some interesting, individual ideas and moments hidden in here somewhere. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia and hive mind control for one. The notion of linking the story to NASA and the historical first landing of a robotic research unit on Mars (perhaps prompting some “greater intelligence” to pay attention to us as a species for the first time) for another. Not that these are the notions you ultimately take away from the movie. No, instead you’ll walk out thinking just what was that preposterously silly film all about?

**