Title: The Box
Director: Richard Kelly
Studio: Warner Brothers
Actors: Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn, Holmes Osborne
“What the fuck is happening?”
Say that out loud. Let it roll around on your tongue like a fine wine. Practice it until the words begin to lose all meaning – because if you choose to actually watch The Box, you’re going to be saying it an awful lot.
Cameron Diaz and James Marsden star in this twisted tale of morality as a married couple with financial difficulties. When a mysterious package containing a box with a push-button arrives at their door, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) shows up to explain how this simple box could change their lives forever. If they press the button, someone in the world whom they don’t know, will die, but the two of them will receive one million dollars. If they choose not to, no harm, no foul, he takes the box back and continues on his way. Will they or won’t they push the button? Oh god! The moral conundrum!
The core plotline described above pretty much sums up the entire story on which this movie is based. A short story called, “Button, Button”, as well as the better known Twilight Zone episode, encapsulate the story with brevity, and the moral lesson is served better by it. The Box on the other hand lumbers through its 115 minute run time with such disregard for the source material that at one point you’ll no doubt ask yourself, “Wait. What does this have to do with a box and a button?”
It feels as though the writers for this embarrassment had a sci-fi story already penned, but needed some sort of event to frame it around. Maybe one of them was brainstorming with The Twilight Zone on in the background when this particular brand of movie magic occurred. The interesting part is, you can actually feel where the Twilight Zone episode ends, and the ridiculous filler begins (it’s the 35 minute mark, for those of you keeping score).
To be fair, the Twilight Zone episode wasn’t something particularly special – the acting and dialogue was terrible and more than a little cheesy. However, because it was so brief, it at least stayed true to the point of the story. There wasn’t anything in it that wasn’t relevant and by the time the twist is revealed in the end, the point is made and the story concludes satisfactorily.
The Box, however, is a clusterfuck of storyline. What begins simply enough with a moral choice that everyone can understand devolves into a mess, covering such topics as: the government, NASA, purgatory, mass-hypnosis, and magic/bizarre, unexplained phenomenon.
It’s fine to ask an audience to suspend its disbelief a bit for a science-fiction/thriller, but not at the cost of any sort of logical plausibility. Nothing in this film makes sense. Instead of eerie atmosphere and suspense, the film creates scenes of unintentional laughter and eye-rolling. The dialogue has some moments that are so bad, it just make a person’s skin crawl. The acting is about as good as it probably could have been given the nothing they had to work with.
The bottom line is that this movie takes a very short, simple, almost parabolic tale of morality and bloats it to a point of no longer being recognizable. It’s hard to imagine the rationalization behind creating a feature length film from a 20 minute, simplistic tale, but if it’s one thing Hollywood has proven time and again, it’s that they love their remakes.
Here is the complete Twilight Zone episode Button, Button.
