A bird in the hand is worth two in George Bush*. Wait, what...

I spent a fairly decent chunk of this weekend ruining my eyesight by staring at tiny pixels and trying to animate them into something that didn’t resemble a freshly served turd; despite having no idea what I was doing past the occasional behind the scenes featurette I think it turned out ok, although I struggled to share it on Facebook for some reason and it won’t let me embed it here for probably yet another paltry reason. I doubt Disney are clamouring for my contact details, especially seeing as I more or less relentlessly rag on them for being the money-hungry Star Wars ruiners that they are. Excursions into the world of animation aside, I have actually got round to watching a few movies; I have a check list of impending watches in a neat pile of DVDs on the corner of my desk. Ok, maybe not neat, but certainly a pile.

It probably won’t be long before there’s nowhere to browse for physical media, which is an almighty shame really. As good as streaming services are, you’re held to the whims of populists and licencing deals which is why you can only watch what they want you to watch, when they want you to watch it (assuming they can afford it). On the flip side of that, you do get those much vaunted exclusives, but let’s be honest, you’d have to subscribe to at least three different streaming services to get to watch everything on release and that starts racking up the fees doesn’t it? I won’t divulge exactly what I pay for the privilege of not watching about 70 channels and paying for a landline I don’t use, (because who even has a phone tethered to their house any longer?) but rest assured it is extortionate and I’m getting close to the point where I can do something about it, but only with 30 days’ notice or they’ll charge me an extra month, plus disconnection fee, plus whatever it takes to send the equipment back plus admin fees plus ransom on your dog or whatever they see fit to rob you of. Don’t get me started on TV Licence Fees, I won’t stop and nobody wants to watch a grown man soil himself with rage.

Netflix seems to be churning out exclusives on the basis that quantity is indeed quality, but somebody somewhere has misinformed them because the best they’ve managed so far on the film front has been mediocre at best. Bright, Annihilation, Cloverfield Paradox, all those unnameable Adam Sandler movies; nothing amongst them stood out. Even the divisive Bandersnatch, if you boil it down to bare essentials and drop the litigious Choose Your Own Adventure gimmick wasn’t particularly good really. They keep trying though, pushing those exclusives down your throat and there’s always a flashy sound bite accompanying it. Where then, does the latest Netflix-clusive (I should copyright that and sell it to them. Made for life!) Bird Box sit in the grand scheme of things? It just sort of nestles in with all the others in a muddle of forgettable sci-fi/horror pulp.

It seems patently obvious that somebody attached to this production watched A Quiet Place and thought (fairly arrogantly, if we’re honest) that they could top it. The pitch probably went something like: “Imagine A Quiet Place, but instead of not saying things, you have to not see things”. Once you write it down it looks a bit silly, which is of course why Netflix deployed their money cannons and fired liberal amounts of cash at it until a movie plopped out of the other end, gasping through amniotic bubbles and tottering around on barely functioning legs.

The central premise of Bird Box is that something is causing people en masse to commit suicide in cinematically creative ways once they get a good glimpse of them. It turns out that the creature/entity/thingamajig makes you see your worst fear and that causes you to be so terribly depressed that you off yourself. So basically it’s invasion of the Boggarts from the Harry Potter Saga, but nobody bats an eye to that blatant concept-thievery and off we go into a world where people fumble around aimlessly wearing blindfolds, shoot guns literally aimlessly wearing blindfolds and navigate entire streets of debris strewn suburbs in a blacked out car purely by sat-nav and parking sensors alone. The main character is heavily pregnant, I assume because that’s how A Quiet Place did it and then later on there are slightly grown up kids involved because we all know you can’t have any sort of suspense horror nowadays without the younger generation screwing it up for everybody by being clumsy, disobedient or generally feckless. The problem, really, is that actually it isn’t very suspenseful. Even the bits where the evil forces are hot on our stumbling heroes’ heels, it’s not really very tense. It comes down to the characters for me; none of them is particularly likeable so you don’t really give a blindfolded shit when they’re about to bite it. Sandra Bullock is a capable actress and she does her level best but she couldn’t save this with a team of paramedics, fire fighters and The Avengers, blindfolded or not. Case in point: she ends up in charge of her own offspring and the similarly-aged child of one of the other survivors who was doing pretty well until she hurled herself unconvincingly through a second floor window, mere hours after giving birth. For no good reason, she calls the girl “Girl” and the boy “Boy” in what has to be the biggest dick move in the history of naming kids. It’s so completely unnecessary; ostensibly it’s to show how detached from motherhood she is and how she’s frightened to have to care for these children in the face of fairly overwhelming odds, but it just comes across as lazy writing: when she names them after the girl’s mother and the boy after her post-apocalyptic, now dead boyfriend it’s just a really cheap emotional pop designed to make the more simpering of audiences spout a few tears and go home thinking they’ve witnessed something emotionally transformative. Same goes for the symbolic releasing of the birds they’ve been using like canaries in a mine to key them into the presence of the bad guys; I get it, they’re free now, you don’t have to do the equivalent of a Wile E. Coyote sign.

There are a bunch of other generally dissatisfying things throughout the movie, but not least the fact that the most we ever see of the attackers is the increased gusting of the wind and the occasional tree shaking. We get to see the effect they have on their victim’s eyeballs which is great I guess, but there’s literally no pay off. We don’t know where they came from, why they’re here, whether they can be defeated; there is literally no glimpse of them physically at all. Ironically though, we might have been spared; if the behind-the-scenes documentary on YouTube is to be believed the FX department knocked up the prosthetics and make-up for these veiny, distended oversized man-baby looking things which would have had me rolling in the aisles rather than reaching for a blindfold.

*No birds or George Bushes were harmed in the creation of the title pun. Which may be a shame depending on your political affiliations.