The Box Movie Review

Written on November 8, 2009 by Marc Eastman in Movies

When it comes to moral decisions, humans are actually quite fascinating. I say that not because of anything The Box relates in its unbearable two-hour delivery, but because when moral conundrums are taken as the jumping off point for a story, this sort of nonsense is the result.

Based loosely on a short story by Richard Matheson, which was made into a very popular episode of The Twilight Zone, the story begins with a couple receiving a mysterious box with a large red button on top. A creepy man shows up to tell them that he wants to offer them a kind of opportunity. If they push the button, two things will happen: 1) someone, somewhere in the world, will die. 2) they will receive $1 million dollars. It’s 1976, so adjust your monetary thoughts accordingly.

It is pointedly explained, that the person who dies will be, “someone you don’t know.”

Therein lies the gag of the short story, and the Twilight Zone adaptation. They push the button, get the money, and the odd man comes back to tell them that the box will be reset and given to, “someone who doesn’t know you.” Bang. Gasp. Shazam. And, you’ve got a fun half-hour that’s worth talking about, and everyone gets to ask everyone they know if they would have pushed the button.

You aren’t supposed to really think too much, and that’s the beauty of it. It isn’t so much a truly serious moral dilemma, as it is something more like a fable, and perhaps “coffee table ethics.” It isn’t a situational challenge that those working in the philosophy of morality are going to write papers on (not least because – A) it’s a cheat, and B) there’s a pretty solid view that the moral stance in the situation rests on the box-giver, not the button-pusher – the pushing of a button that does not in itself kill a person, ipso facto does not kill a person).

No, it’s just a bit of a laugh really, and a fun story.

The problem with Richard Kelly‘s film is that it attempts to be intensely serious in its dilemma. So serious in fact that, like many films, it believes that being long and slow somehow makes you even more serious. Instead of taking a semi-philosophic jumping off point and going for a ride (like The Matrix, or similar), The Box is so serious that it basically comes over as having the deadeningly superior viewpoint of its own moral questioners.

There’s too much time to think in the telling, and before long you’re moved to start taking the general question apart just out of boredom. You start wondering, especially once you are witness to much of the conspiratorial goings-on that are actually involved, if the question isn’t really more like, “If you push the button, I will kill someone and I will give $1 million dollars.” Much like the situation, “If you don’t kill this person, I will kill these other ten people,” we might easily be moved to think that who you kill, and why you choose to do it, is none of our affair really, and doesn’t create a moral problem for us.

Worse, after spending far too long with meaninglessly dramatic sequences piled on top of one another, our plagued couple is presented with another dilemma. Our morally superior testers rather condescendingly up the ante. In a bizarre move that is somewhat difficult to fit into the overall puzzle, what is apparently the “right choice,” this time around is something that seems an order of magnitude more morally reprehensible than pushing the button in the first place. In the end, we’re apparently left with the idea that some decidedly evil unknowns are attempting to determine if we measure up morally. What one is meant to do with that as a movie is anyone’s guess.

Everything to do with morality aside, the film is simply tedious. I would normally say of a film that slogs through two hours that it clearly needed to lose 30 minutes or more, but I can’t see that it would help this film a bit. It isn’t simply that the movie is too long, every scene in it is too long. It is mind-numbingly slow, and clearly on purpose, as though being slow created tension and foreboding on its own. You would want to talk about cutting the unnecessary scenes, and there are a great many of them, but you wonder how you would know where to stop, which is perhaps why they’re there.

The truth is that everything about the movie is wrong, and you have so much time on your hands, with no real tension or action distracting you, that you can’t help but notice. Cameron Diaz is absolutely lost at everything she tries here. James Marsden isn’t too bad, but his portrayal comes across as somewhat at cross purposes to the film’s delivery. Frank Langella isn’t bad really, but seems to be in a few different movies at different times. Even the styling of the ’70s is so silly you feel like it’s trying to make a statement, but what could it be? I mean, no one house had all the most ridiculous design elements from the Worst of the ’70s in it.

When I saw Donnie Darko, there was no one I wanted to see another film from more than Richard Kelly. Now I’ve had Southland Tales and The Box, and there is hardly anyone I’m less interested in. It seems clear that Donnie Darko was just that first album, and I’ve been a fan of too many bands who never did anything worth a damn again.

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