The Box: Do Not Want

This ain't the first time a movie about a Box has totally sapped my will to live.

I’m not entirely sure when this blog became nothing but half-assed movie reviews. I’ll have to launch an investigation. Until I figure it out, just be thankful that I throw myself on Crap Grenades so you don’t have to. In other words, I sat down and watched The Box starring Cameron Diaz the other night, and now that my week has been ruined you are safe from this horror.

The Box is a movie based on Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button”, written way back in 1970. I have something of a Writerly Man Crush on Matheson; not only have I loved most of his writing, but he’s endured, which isn’t easy. I’d like to think someone like Will Smith is going to make a travesty out of one of my books decades after I’m gone, but chances are slim.

The basic premise is this: A financially strapped couple are visited by a mysterious man who gives them a box with a button. He tells them that if they press the button, they will receive $1 million, and someone “they do not know” will die. That’s the same premise as the original story, more or less. The original story, of course, ends pretty quickly. It’s creepy, and it’s effective – hell, they’re still adapting it forty years later. I’d call that effective.

The movie, unfortunately, grinds on for quite some time after this set up. Forget Cameron Diaz’s unfortunate accent. Forget that I am increasingly convinced writer/director Richard Kelly was merely impenetrably lucky and not a genius when he made Donnie Darko. The simple fact of the matter is, The Box starts off with a terrific premise (albeit one given to the filmmaker by the howling ghost of a much better storyteller) and then completely and utterly fails to develop that premise into anything nearly as good.

This is a pretty common problem for writers. The high-concept idea is not that hard to come up with, but plotting is frickin’ hard. It’s easy enough to imagine a world where robots have rebelled against us and rule the world, it’s difficult to tell a story around that premise. If you doubt me, try it.

What Kelly does with his solid-gold premise here is flail about and come up with a ridiculous reason behind the premise, and then he doubles down on that ridiculous reason and dares you to drown in the ridiculous. Which is audacious in its way.

<— SPOILERS AHOY! Turn back now if you don’t want this story ruined for you. —>

In the film, the whole box thing is an experiment being performed by aliens trying to determine if the human race should be exterminated or not. The film is set in the mid-70s when NASA is preparing to send probes to Mars, and apparently these aliens once wiped out all the Martians because they failed a similar test. The aliens have taken over the body of an NSA operative played by Frank Langella, who must have had a mortgage payment looming, and he runs the experiment using NSA resources and a large number of “employees” who are basically mind-controlled humans.

Got that so far?

Ah, but there’s more, because once you declare it an experiment like that the story’s more or less over, isn’t it. I mean, they pushed the button, got their million, someone across town is shot to death: One more tick in the Fail box for the human race, eh? Or perhaps a tick in the Win box – who knows what aliens might be looking for as far as morality and decision-making goes? So Kelly has to figure out a second phase, which comes out of bloody nowhere: After pushing the box the couple make some feeble attempts to figure out what’s going on, and Langella’s alien/NSA hybrid gets annoyed and pushes back, punishing them.

Except that’s a dodge, too, because after a while it’s revealed that there’s a second phase to the experiment, where Langella kidnaps the couple’s son, turns him blind and deaf, and then tells the couple that they can restore their son to perfect health, and the $1 million will be placed in an interest-bearing account in his name, if the husband shoots the wife dead.

Got that? The implication being that there’s your death of “someone you don’t know” – they’re the previous people who pushed the button. Make sense? Nope. The whole “we’ve hurt your child terribly and now you have to make another moral choice” comes out of nowhere and fuck if I can make sense of it. First of all, the couple were not told of these possible consequences, so they can’t be blamed for what happens to their son. Sure, you can look at it as punishment for being willing to kill a stranger for $1 million, but then what does shooting the wife have to do with it?

This is just Premise Bloat. This is what happens when you have a great set up for a story and then realize you don’t have any story there, so you just go batshit and run with it. And then there’s a moment of exhilaration where you realize you just crossed some sort of personal Rubicon into batshit territory, and what the hell, you can do anything you want! Anything you want. Doesn’t matter if it makes any sense.

I think part of what offends me about the movie is that Matheson’s initial concept is a neat one: Compact, powerful. You could actually tell a very good movie-length story with that as a basis: You could explore the couple’s relationship, why one of them pushes the button instead of the other. Maybe they disagree violently about whether to do it.  Maybe they get the money and try to enjoy it, but it sours every time. Maybe they become obsessed with the “person they do not know” and try to find out who suffered for their greed. Maybe you go down the familiar path of each button-pushing couple killing the previous button-pushing couple, and the last act of the story is the couple’s desperate attempt to locate the next recipients of the Box to try and save their own lives. There are plenty of ways to tell a compelling story here, jumping off from that golden premise. Kelly chose none of them.

Ah, but then, maybe I’m cranky. Or drunk. Possible both.