by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Box (2009)

Videovista have my review of Richard Kelly’s The Box.

From the director of Donnie Darko comes a weirdly iconoclastic film based upon a Richard Matheson short story.  Initially, the film structures itself around a moral thought experiment asking us to consider whether we would kill someone we do not know for $1,000,000.  However, then the film opens up into a science fiction conspiracy theory that is one part Alan J. Pakula to one part Arthur C. Clarke.  Not entirely convincing partly because the ideas it contains are so utterly weird, but I did enjoy the rather brutal satire of Christianity as a sinister alien conspiracy.

2 Comments

  1. Heh. I’ve thought about renting this one because almost all the critics panned it and yet did so in ways that made it sound as though, while it wasn’t the kind of thing that they could parse, it might definitely be mine.

    Now you tell me it’s: “a science fiction conspiracy theory that is one part Alan J. Pakula to one part Arthur C. Clarke.” Alright! Sounds phildickian in its concerns, without being an imitation.

    So I’ll give it a try. If it’s a total stinker, I’ll come back and give you hell.

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  2. It’s definitely phildickian. Right down to the unanswered questions and the ideas so big that they struggle to fit into a coherent narrative.

    …but then I’d say that the Parallax View also suffered from that problem :-)

    I really liked it, for all its weirdness and ungainliness, but I can completely understand why people would hate it.

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