Movie Review: The Box
- Theatrical release date
- November 6, 2009
- DVD release date
- TBA
- Grade
- C
A thriller with no real thrills.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Lord of the Rings, the heroes are assailed by nightmarish figures in black, the Ringwraiths. Wraiths, we are told, are humans who have traveled down a very dark road, a road that begins with a single choice: whether or not to remain a moral being. At first, the person facing such a choice thinks “it’ll be OK to let things slide just this once,” or “I can do this now and rectify it later.” As long as the immoral behavior can be justified, the person feels that cutting ethical corners can be acceptable. The only problem is, once the person chooses that path, there really is no way back. The “wraithing process” (as T.A. Shippey calls it) has begun, and it’s a road that only goes one way.
Although that may seem far afield, the dilemma of this movie is just this. Do our main characters choose to remain moral beings, or do they justify an unethical action to the point that they take the first irrevocable step down the road of no return? If our main characters push a button, they will receive a million dollars. But if they do so, someone they don’t know will die. They have no way of knowing who, exactly, will be chosen to die for the choice they make, except that the person will be a stranger to them. And in return, they will have money.
Unfortunately, the glacial pacing of the movie removes much of the tension, and the justifications the characters cite for even considering pushing the button aren’t convincing. Norma (Cameron Diaz) is no longer going to be able to send her son to private school for financial reasons, and her husband Arthur (James Marsden) has been rejected for the space shuttle astronaut program. Yet they both retain their jobs and Arthur has a shiny new car. It would seem that their fortunes aren’t really so bad. Perhaps their son might have to go to public school, and/or Arthur will need to get a different job if he’s bored with the one he has. The one he has, however, appears to be quite stable (his bosses make a point of saying that if he wants to move to a different department, they’re willing to invent a job and a title for him).
In any event, it doesn’t appear Norma and Arthur are desperate enough to be willing to take the gamble that they can live knowing they have caused the death of another person in exchange for a briefcase full of money. This, perhaps, is the director’s point — that people are willing to compromise even their most basic and cherished principles for what, in the end, isn’t very much at all. And if the movie had remained focused on that, it would have been much more intriguing.
At this point, though, the movie descends into a crazy rabbit hole of its own to no apparent purpose.
Roughly halfway through the film, the moral dilemma aspect of the movie is overtaken by odd and ill-fitting science fiction trappings. It seems that aliens are testing us (much like the aliens of last year’s The Day the Earth Stood Still) to see if we’re worthy of survival. How can we pass the test? It’s simple: refuse to push the button. In the end, the aliens want to know: are we truly moral and ethical beings, or are we really all just one tiny push away from becoming wraiths?
But who are the aliens? Why do they care? And if they’re so obsessed with humans being upright and moral, how do they justify their own plans to exterminate us? We don’t get answers to those questions. It’s implied the aliens are from Mars (they experiment on us after the Viking I landing, and the people they start the experiment with are the NASA scientists who built the probe), but otherwise, no information is forthcoming. Does the alien religion teach that only the moral shall survive? Or are the aliens just bored? Maybe their experiments are being broadcast back home as the newest Martian reality show. We don’t know.
The movie crumples in the end into a confused mess with talk of “eternal damnation” and “salvation” that goes nowhere if the aliens aren’t going to at least tell us what they mean by those terms. And after Norma and Arthur’s lives are destroyed, the aliens merely move on to the next family. And so it goes. The audience is left to assume that people will continue to choose money over principle, and that eventually the aliens will pack up the experiment and snuff us out.
I suppose the moral of the movie is, don’t compromise your principles because you never know who’s watching, though I’m more inclined to think it’s really movie aliens are just itching for any excuse to kill seven billion humans. Whatever. Honestly, the internal drama of fallible people negotiating their own principles with themselves is (or at least should have been, given the wretched pacing of this movie) vastly more interesting than watching people fight an external foe. Yet the movie only makes a jab at the former before shying away to concentrate on the latter, and suffers for it.
At best, this is a rental.
PS One of the cliches of modern SF movies is that, somewhere in them, at some point, there will be a large, spinning fan. This movie has two of them.
Copyright Martha Kneib. Published 12 November 2009 in What’s New.
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