The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)

[domino harvey]

I had that happen with eXistenZ back in the day, but I still checked it out

[karmajuice]

He eventually ended up renting it. We watched it. Obnoxious mess of a film, but we had a blast watching it.

[HistoryProf]

He eventually ended up renting it. We watched it. Obnoxious mess of a film, but we had a blast watching it.

My wife looked at me at the end and asked "what the hell was that?" I had to confess I couldn't say. I still have no idea what this piece of crap was even about. one of the worst movies i've ever seen....just completely incomprehensible. I was really looking forward to it too...and talked her into watching it. oops.

[HistoryProf]

oh, and I forgot Cameron Diaz with a southern accent. dear god. perhaps we can get Congress to enact a prohibitive Diaz tariff that would prevent her from ever being cast in an American film ever again? Please?

[tenia]

one of the worst movies i've ever seen....just completely incomprehensible.

I love this type of assertion.

Cause
1) If this is one of the worst movies you've ever seen, you've never seen bad movies. Believe me.
2) I understood quite well the movie. And I think I'm not the only one, and certainly some people I know understood it better, and are probably able to explain it to you and debate about it for 2 hours. So, I don't know, maybe it's you... :-"

[Alphonse Doinel]

I was actually fairly intrigued by this until Kelly started getting out of control. I swear the guy was making decisions out of a hat because the amount of random plot points in this is staggering.

The score is excellent though.

[HistoryProf]

one of the worst movies i've ever seen....just completely incomprehensible.

I love this type of assertion.

Cause
1) If this is one of the worst movies you've ever seen, you've never seen bad movies. Believe me.
2) I understood quite well the movie. And I think I'm not the only one, and certainly some people I know understood it better, and are probably able to explain it to you and debate about it for 2 hours. So, I don't know, maybe it's you... :-"

I think the numerous opinions here that it is full of incomprehensible random "plot" points illustrate clearly the film is a mess. It's not me, it's Kelley. He needs someone to reign him in and make sense of the 42 thousand ideas he tries to cram in to this.

I also did not bother to see SLT after the horrid reviews, so perhaps that hurt my chances of understanding this hot mess. but to suggest that I lack intelligence because I did not engage the overwhelming incongruity of this film is about as puerile as forum exchanges get. I've seen lots and lots of bad movies, and this one is right up there for it's pretension to greatness and the overall failure of its ability to make sense. Movies don't have to be Plan 9 to suck, and I actually respect your average B bad movie for not aspiring to be anything more....but when you pretend to be the next great mindfuck and promise brilliance and challenging ideas - then you better deliver.

I LOVED Donnie Darko on initial viewings, but I'm sad he's been unable to fulfill the promise of that debut. I think the success went to his head a bit too much, and he's focused more on messing with viewer's heads than telling a good story. Like I said, I wanted so bad for this to be great...but I was left scratching my head at all the nonsense he threw at the wall hoping something would stick.

[Brian C]

but to suggest that I lack intelligence because I did not engage the overwhelming incongruity of this film is about as puerile as forum exchanges get.

But if you don't want to engage the film, why come over here just to bash it? I mean, I didn't really care for the movie either, but not having any more to say about it than that, I'm not going to come to this forum to take a giant crap on it just for the sake of registering my opinion. A certain level of restraint seems like a courtesy to the other members here, who are looking for something a little more thoughtful than an IMDb-message-board-level "Damn this movie sux!!!1!!1" I have my own blog for that, you know?

[HistoryProf]

because i noticed quite a few opinions in line with my own and thought it not a crazy idea to agree with them. I didn't say "this movie sux" - I said it was an incoherent mess that neither myself nor my wife could make any sense at all of. That's a pretty clear criticism of the film.

No I did not write a dissertation on why it's incoherent. that would be stupid, and frankly, it isn't worth it. I didn't realize adding my own opinion to the chorus of "jesus that was dreadful" and "holy shit it's ridiculous" was going to be such an affront to the core values of the forum. My apologies.

And again, enough with the "you must be stupid if you didn't like this or don't understand it's awesome profundity" - how is that "engaging the film"? I swear, the elitism here can be utterly suffocating.

[John Cope]

I LOVED Donnie Darko on initial viewings, but I'm sad he's been unable to fulfill the promise of that debut. I think the success went to his head a bit too much, and he's focused more on messing with viewer's heads than telling a good story. Like I said, I wanted so bad for this to be great...but I was left scratching my head at all the nonsense he threw at the wall hoping something would stick.

Interestingly enough I think I'd have to adhere to the exact opposite narrative for Kelly's career. For me it only really took off with his director's cut of Donnie Darko, which made explicit what his real interests were (this, I suspect, is what may have started the precipitous decline in respect amongst his fan base). Since then, he has built on that breakthrough to expand out its implications, both in terms of thematic resonance and formal strategies.

[tenia]

I also did not bother to see SLT after the horrid reviews, so perhaps that hurt my chances of understanding this hot mess. but to suggest that I lack intelligence because I did not engage the overwhelming incongruity of this film is about as puerile as forum exchanges get.

I know, and it was said as part of a joke, but, honestly, I've seen so many people bashing movies because "it's non-understandable" that it makes me laugh each time I read it.
Cause they're always people to understand the movies, and to explain it, and everything.
And what's funny (and it's why I allowed myself to do this little humourous post) is that I discussed about the movie on another forum not even a month ago, but like pages and pages.

Nobody said "I didn't understand it, so it sucks".

It's like saying (I heard it so many time before) that Memento, Pulp Fiction or Sin City suck, just because some people don't understand the narrative structure.

Of course, here, it's another problem, as you said it : the narrative elements, and everything.
But remember precisely that Kelly never wanted to be the "Next mindfuck".

Precisely.
He always said, precisely, that the movie is a B movie in hommage to Twilight Zone episodes.
So...

But anyway. Sorry for the puerile post. I know it was not "engaging the movie". But, I couldn' let the way to make your sentences go without saying a word.
Here again : "neither myself nor my wife could make any sense at all of". So, I don't know, I was just saying : maybe it's you.

But I'm really interested by what you found to be all non-sense. I found the movie pretty coherent, so if you could expand, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Alphonse Doinel]

I buy into the 'b movie homage' about as much as I did for The Happening. Downplaying your film just seems like a strategic move when you know trouble is ahead.

If it really was an homage wouldn't Kelly would have stuck to the core story, rather than convolute the plot with

Spoiler

disabilities, mars missions, aliens, superpowers, space travel, wormholes

, and everything else he jammed in there?

None of these elements in particular made it a bad film for me. I just got the distinct feeling that Kelly was melding together the films he wanted to make, rather than the film.

[Zumpano]

Technical question for renters/Netflixters of "The Box":
Did your DVD/BR have the bonus features, or is this another case of retail-only bonus features? I ran into this when Netflixing the BR of "(500) Days of Summer"; none of the bonus features.

[karmajuice]

I understood every moment of The Box, and also understood that every moment of it was inane, vapid, and poorly crafted. Nevermind that the acting is terrible, that the special effects are distractingly bad, that the plot is convoluted. I'm more concerned with the fact that those convolutions have no purpose, that they don't build toward anything interesting or cohesive. I also think the fatalism inherent in its cyclical structure is absurd at both ends, and the film wants to be humanist while having a structure which is founded upon misanthropy. The film is silly and stupid and I can't imagine trying to defend it, except as an intellectual exercise.

If it's homage, it's a bad homage. The Twilight Zone episodes are always concise, specific, and carefully structured. They possess some surface similarities, but that's about it.

[John Cope]

The film is silly and stupid and I can't imagine trying to defend it, except as an intellectual exercise.

I really don't think it's that hard to mount a cogent defense of The Box, nor do I think it's a cynical exercise in over-reach.

I'm more concerned with the fact that those convolutions have no purpose, that they don't build toward anything interesting or cohesive.

What purpose do they need to have other than expanding the frame, providing a larger context for the presumptive main action? You seem to think this was an error rather than a constructive decision. Making these details cohere is not inherently critical to this narrative or perhaps even desirable (though clearly it was to you). On their own terms though I find just about all of Kelly's supposed tangents utterly fascinating. It's the effect of what they suggest that counts.

I also think the fatalism inherent in its cyclical structure is absurd at both ends, and the film wants to be humanist while having a structure which is founded upon misanthropy.

But that's the problem with which we're left to contend. The misanthropy does not have to cancel out the humanism or vice versa. One is not necessarily more true than the other though perhaps they do make one another possible.

If it's homage, it's a bad homage. The Twilight Zone episodes are always concise, specific, and carefully structured. They possess some surface similarities, but that's about it.

As I suggested earlier, the difference is in the added emotional weight, the cosmic depths, the tragedy of fate (why should fate be tragic?). All this extends the reach of the metaphor at the heart of the parable.

[Mr Sausage]

But that's the problem with which we're left to contend. The misanthropy does not have to cancel out the humanism or vice versa. One is not necessarily more true than the other though perhaps they do make one another possible.

Misanthropy and humanism are mutually exclusive. Humanism, at least modern humanism, is based around the idea of the inherant worth and value of humanity. Misanthropy functions under the exact opposite assumption, that human beings are worthless and to be despised. They are both at extreme ends of the ideological spectrum, and while someone may combine both feelings in a diluted middle ground, they cannot insist that they believe both extremes equally, not without being perfectly incomprehensible.

Karmajuice is right to suspect that any cyclical structure based around perpetuating misery and debasement is not humanist. Fate is a tricky idea for a humanist, and I understand it is most often rejected. In terms of narrative, any fate that is not the result of character or of human choice, meaning it is the construct of a god or an author/filmmaker above the mortal action of the narrative, is not humanist for the obvious reason that it removes humans from the central position and makes them the pawn of larger forces.

I gather what you're trying to say is that the movie toys with both ideas, the old "is it fate or free will?" debate. My addition is to say that any repeating structure cancels out free will because it's not individualized.

...the tragedy of fate (why should fate be tragic?).

When bad things happen it's fate, when good things happen it's destiny. Apparently people don't much like the idea that it's the same process either way with the same lack of control.

[karmajuice]

I apologize for my previous post, which was more a dumbfounded reaction to anyone admiring the film and less a valid criticism of the film. My primary objection is the film's fatalism and the humanist/misanthropic paradox built into its structure, which Mr_sausage elaborated on nicely. I have difficulty finding any kind of tragic depth in the film. I feel like I should be affected by the persistence of the cycle, but it's based on too many shallow presumptions about how people behave. It feels subservient to the purposes of a slipshod narrative. I don't think Kelly has anything in particular to say about the perpetuation of human error.

I'd like to retract my statement about the film not building toward a purpose. It's a valid enough criticism coming from a certain perspective, but it's not my perspective so it was dishonest of me to say it. I love tangents and messy films and don't mind how well they cohere, provided the fractured parts offer something on their own. The Box's tangents offer very little. They are a mess of pseudo-science and vague mysticism which amount to a patchwork of sci-fi cliches robbed of a context. However, I'd like to know which particular tangents you find most interesting, and why. Our opinions also differed in regard to Shutter Island, but in that case I at least found moments, images, and strands of thought worth investigating. With The Box, I'm not sure I can recall a single instance I consider exceptional.

I look forward to the day we agree about a film, and seeing what film that ends up being.

[Brian C]

I don't really see the misantropy in the film. The couple played by Diaz and Marsden aren't "worthless" or despicable; to the contrary, Kelly takes great pains to show us that, despite their bad choice, they're decent people.

What I would say is that the movie was an attempt to balance a generally humanistic worldview with the observation that people often act according to their own self-interests over the interest of the rest of society. It may be cynical to believe that people will act against their fellow man when motivated to do so, but I don't think that's a particularly controversial thing to point out, and trying to reconcile that with the "inherent worth" of people is a worthy premise for a film.

[karmajuice]

I don't really see the misantropy in the film. The couple played by Diaz and Marsden aren't "worthless" or despicable; to the contrary, Kelly takes great pains to show us that, despite their bad choice, they're decent people.

That's precisely my point. That's the humanist edge. The misanthropic quality is the film's assertion/assumption that every single person on this planet would kill for a million dollars. It doesn't bother me that someone made that choice -- humanism isn't human without the flaws -- but the suggestion that humanity as a whole is an invariable pattern does. Note that every couple ends up going through the same cycle, like they're part of a preset mechanism. In fact, maybe the only interesting thing about the film is its depiction of the family and how it functions within this mechanism. The result is more troublesome than it is enlightening, but the dynamic of husband/wife/child and their respective roles in the pre-determined drama at least raises compelling questions. For instance, why is it that the wife is depicted as pushing the button each time? (We don't see the button-pushing of the preceding event, but since each character plays out the same role we might presume that the wife presses it then too.) I'd be curious to find out the motivation behind that decision.

[MoonlitKnight]

Again, for me, the whole thing was a metaphor for how humans keep repeating the same fuck-ups they've been making for thousands of years now. #-o

[Mr Sausage]

If human beings were such incorrigible bunglers one wonders how we managed to achieve as much as we have.

[Tark]

If human beings were such incorrigible bunglers one wonders how we managed to achieve as much as we have.

I have the answer.

Let's all meet in the off-topic forum.

[Mr Sausage]

If human beings were such incorrigible bunglers one wonders how we managed to achieve as much as we have.

I have the answer.

Let's all meet in the off-topic forum.

The point is that we're not.

[MoonlitKnight]

For all our knowledge and potential, the lure of power remains all too seductive (and corrupting) for all but the most strong-minded individuals (and they're a vast minority). When you use your power to do something, it HAS to be all-inclusive; it's the whole 'every man for himself' mindset that almost always causes the trouble.

[colinr0380]

Inspired by the debate on this thread (John Cope's comments in particular) and my seemingly bizarre interest in the wonderfully sprawling mess of Southland Tales, I checked out The Box last night. I liked it a great deal. Major spoilers follow:

Having watched the 1980s Twilight Zone episode of Button, Button to prepare for Kelly's film but having not read Matheson's original story I wonder if anyone could let me know whether the relationship between the couple is the same in the Matheson story and the Twilight Zone episode? In the episode the couple are very broadly played, with the wife a monstrously bitchy low class harridan and the husband a passive cuckold, so I ended up very clearly sympathising with the husband and glad that the wife was going to get her comeuppance in the zinger twist ending.

However Kelly's film keeps the couple very sympathetic. I wonder if this is partly through bringing the autobiographical elements of his parents into the story that caused this due to not wishing to push either member of the couple into easy hero/villain territory. If this was the case it was a great move, since we get a couple who never start blaming each other for their problems, which itself suggests that an individual morality tale of personal greed is not what is being critiqued here but the circumstances that force people into taking drastic steps or overlooking their conscience when the odds appear to be stacked towards them getting away scot-free.

Whether that is the aspirational lifestyle, the employers cutting back on funding for scholarships, being rejected for a promotion to astronaut training due to failing psychological tests (incidentally I like the resonance of this moment, since Arthur sort of ends up proving his psychological resillience through the rest of the film!) or facing arbitrary tests from extraterrestrial intelligences, it is all the same in external, coercive pressure terms!

The film feels very much about parents keeping the details of the adult world from their children (the many shots of Walter curious about what his parents are mumbling about, or why they seem so guarded all of a sudden) for their own protection from outside worries but eventually causing them more pain as the events hit their child with more impact when it finally becomes too big an issue to keep from them.

There is also an interesting theme of disability running through the film, beginning with the scene where Norma is goaded by a nasty pupil in her class about her limp and shows her maimed foot to the group (this I think is the one off note in the film since I was left wondering why she doesn't tell the kid to mind his own business and get back to discussing Satre's No Exit, but almost as soon as I was thinking that a following scene involving one of Walter's friends asking about the limp and being told it was none of his business takes place!). Then in her confrontation in the library with Arlington she talks of her sympathy for his facial disfigurement and how it puts her own disability into perspective. Then this revelation (of how much disability affects her) appears to be used against her when Walter is kidnapped and returned at the end deaf and blind unless Norma, who pressed the button, is killed.

As well as having an ironic connection with Walter's thwarted curiosity through the film (after being shut out of the situation by his parents trying to resolve the situation without worrying him, he literally ends up being able to 'see no evil' and 'hear no evil'), along with the Viking mission that appears to have been the catalyst for events (sending a probe to Mars to photograph the surface with a 360° camera that Arthur worked on), this all ties in with the aspirational lifestyle being upended too. The aspiration that your children won't have to face the same difficulties that you did, won't have to cope with the same kinds of disabilities, is perhaps the most devastating aspiration for Norma to lose, justifing for her the sacrifice to return her son to 'normal' (yet a normality without a mother and father). In reaching for the stars (or for the million dollars), you lose what you had.

There is also a very interesting religious theme too, with the extraterrestrial intelligence coming more and more to seem like a deity. This itself raises interesting ideas of being tested in various ways through your life to see if you were a 'decent person' or did the right thing, at the same time as making these alien/god figures seem quite callous in their work. For example when told that she must die to restore her son's senses Norma runs after Arlington and asks if she can be forgiven, to which she receives an ambiguous reply. Arthur in particular has been given various visions earlier in the film of something that he believes to be the afterlife (including various exhortions to 'go into the light'), so he at this final point is a believer in 'magical science'. Together he and Norma are able to take the extremely ambiguous information that they have been given by what they have seen and what Arlington has told them to take some comfort both that Walter will get his senses back in the style of a miracle, and that when Norma is killed she will go somewhere else and will eventually be reunited with Arthur.

So there is a huge religious angle to the final section, but it is interestingly ambiguous. Arlington and the various other 'employees' don't seem to care too much about whether Norma is forgiven or not - the limited (and obviously flawed and biased) test was just about whether she was 'greedy' (or needy) enough to push the button, and everything else is of no consequence to them. (In that sense it also has connotations of voting in elections - you get one action to perform, or not perform, as you see fit, and then everything that happens to you following this point is out of your hands but in some ways horribly 'justified' by the consequences of your extremely limited and uninformed action) It feels that Norma and Arthur at the end are just taking some difficult to reconcile crumbs of information from what they have learnt and seen and are just trying to take some slight hope by extrapolating it into an afterlife. After all maybe the film is about nothing more than a way of keeping 911 operators in business with all the regular as clockwork telephone calls about married couples shooting each other!

Kelly's commentary track is interesting for the way that he has a much more obviously religious take on events - he describes the 'employees' as basically benevolent, waiting for us to do the right thing (he also veers dangerously close to conspiracy theorist territory when explaining why the World Trade Center towers appear on the television! And I have to take issue with his praise of Million Dollar Baby, a film which takes difficult issues and coarsens them through overly broad characterisation of supporting characters) However the film itself allows for the viewer to project their own opinion onto the events a lot more - and it was quite refreshing that even a very cynical point of view like mine is in some ways accommodated!

The pared down framework of The Box gives a nice basic structure to the film on which Kelly can embellish with all these extra ideas (compared to Southland Tales which took the basic structure of Donnie Darko and almost subsumed it under the weight of all the different ideas, this feels quite restrained!) I wonder if in addition to Button, Button material was taken from that Outer Limits episode where aliens come to Earth in the form of energy and ask for human corpses which they can use as shells?

I was left thinking of many different films while watching - many of the 70s political paranoia conspiracy thrillers, Capricorn One, Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the possessed employees (even Invaders From Mars in the scene where Walter is lured outside into the snow covered grounds of the mansion before, instead of being sucked underground, he is more disappointingly grabbed and drugged by masked men!), along with a hint of The Devil and Daniel Webster in the way we see the cyclical nature of the tests and get a glimpse of the previous person being unable to escape their fate (also in the way that the babysitter is perhaps the most insiduous/approachable/creepiest character in the film, much as Simone Simon was!)

It is also interestingly shot and staged - there are a lot of slow zooming in shots with a central symmetrical vanishing point almost immediately followed in the next shot by the space being split into half with only one side occupied (I suppose showing the mastery over the frame that the aliens have compared to the more haphazard humans). There are also a lot of rack focus zooming shots. The music is also quite beautiful, especially the cyclical end credit piece escalating in intensity - the only way I could describe it would be like tripping in slow motion down a spiral staircase!

Also I watched Shampoo on the television over the weekend which features a lot of shots of televisions throughout the film showing the Nixon election campaign and mostly ignored by the main characters. It was interesting to note that something similar appears in this film, as the Viking landings appear to be on almost every television screen from around the halfway point of the film!

There are also lots of elements that Kelly seems to have carried over from Donnie Darko to this material: water as a transportation device; 'advanced science seeming like magic' and vice versa; snowballing consequences from the smallest action. The school bullies from Darko get repurposed to the nasty kid in Norma's class at the beginning of the film, who appears again at the wedding rehearsal more obviously possessed and therefore seeming much more like Frank the Bunny!; Diaz's English teacher giving an explicitly foreshadowing lecture on No Exit compares to Drew Barrymore's discussion of Graham Greene's The Destructors in Darko. And in the end the person who caused events to go off down this strange road has to die to set everything right again, though in this case it is the mother rather than the son dying to save what remains of her family, and instead of people on the street looking back at the damaged house it is the isolated, orphaned child left mourning his dead mother and departing father from an upstairs window and getting a creepy, geographically incongruous, tip of the hat from Arlington Steward.