Regular Movie Review: The Box

This was going to be a Horrid Horror Movie Review, but I just can't do it. It's not that this is a good movie; it's that I watched the whole damn thing, and I still can't tell you what was going on in it. It takes the simple idea of "a box with a button that will kill someone and award the button presser one million dollars," and turns it into a pile of nonsense images and hodge-podged ideas. First, its NASA and the NSA working with a disfigured man, then its aliens that want to play with people's heads, then there's a steroid Stephen King in a library chasing that wussy guy who played Cyclops in the X-Men movies, who escapes by going into a pillar of water that takes him home.

I should've known better, though. The minute I saw Cameron Diaz faking a Southern accent while teaching about different views of Hell in a private school, I knew where the movie was heading. When she shows that she's missing four toes (a plot point that I still cannot fathom as to why it was important to this movie), I was utterly confused. When they finally tell us what happened, the story was so bad that it borders on the same line of ridiculousness as House diagnosing Anti-Social disorder by how someone opens a letter.

What makes the movie worse is that Diaz and James Marsden rub in the fact that they're "living paycheck to paycheck." She works at private school, he's an engineer at NASA (and an astronaut candidate). They live in a six bedroom house (with a den, study, and a basement, all bigger than my apartment), and he drives a new (for the the timeline) Corvette. They also mention that they spend "way too much" money on useless things... you know because fixing her damn foot should be the last thing on their minds. The offer is tempting to them because they'll "never see that much money" ever again. If they saved their money instead of spending like crazy, sold the house (seriously, a six bedroom house for three people?), and sold the car, and lived like, you know, people instead of materialistic idiots, they probably would. For that matter, even if they don't see a million dollars by this method, do they really need that much money to be happy? What's more important money that they'll probably spend on things other than her foot and their son, or being happy and disabled?

Oh, in speaking of disabled, the "climax" of the movie is a choice: Kill your wife and your son gets the money or both of you live, but son lives the rest of his life deaf and blind. What do you think they choose? I'd say this is a spoiler, but the only thing you know when watching this movie is how it's going to end. Seriously, why is it so easy for people to take care of healthy kids, but if they go blind or deaf, the kid becomes a hassle? The kid is still alive, isn't he/she? It's better for the kid to be disabled with parents that will love him/her (him in the movie) than to go on without parents, but healthy in relative terms. Of course, this may just be me, and I believe that all life is sacred unless wasted. The choice in this movie is meant to redeem the two characters, and it falls flat on its face. Does the writer seriously think that humanity is that wasted that we'd pass up coping with pain and overcoming it for happiness? First greed, than avarice, then what? Life's hard, people; suck it up and move on.

Overall, this movie acts like it's an art film, filled to the brim with shots that are useless to pushing the movie forward. It puts forth plot points that have nothing to do with the movie as a whole (I guess the missing toes are symbolic, but of what, I have no idea). It's meant to provoke a reacting, but by the end of the movie, you're so tired of the randomness that you just want it to end, and to give you the two hours you spent watching it back.

I give this movie .5 out of six Pandoras screaming.