Mania Grade: C-
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Info:
- DVD: The Box
- Rating: PG-13
- Starring: Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella
- Written By: Richard Kelly
- Directed By: Richard Kelly
- Distributor: Warner Bros Home Entertainment
- Original Year of Release: 2009
- Extras: See Below
- Series:
The Box DVD Review
Will You Care if they Push the Button? By
Tim Janson
February 21, 2010
Cameron Diaz in Richard Kelly's THE BOX(2009).
© Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
The Box is based on a 1970 short story called “Button Button” written by horror icon Richard Matheson. The story was adapted previously as an episode of the 1980’s incarnation of the Twilight Zone. Now, the problem with turning a short story into a feature film is that the story is going to have to be heavily padded, and in the case of The Box, heavily padded. A horribly disfigured man named Arlington Steward (Langella) arrives one day at the suburban Virginia home of Arthur and Norma Lewis, having previously placed a mysterious box on the couple’s doorstep. Inside the box is a large red button locked under a glass dome. Steward tells the couple if they push the button two things will happen. First, they will be given one million dollars, tax free. Second, someone in the world they don’t know will die. This moral test is where the similarity between film and story end.
In the original story, Norma pushes the button and a few days later her husband is killed by a train. When she asks Steward why her husband died, he tells her that she never really knew her husband. Short, direct, and to the point. Unfortunately the film is anything but direct and to the point and Matheson’s story is lost in an absurd haze of alien possession, dimensional gateways, and crackpot science. Steward, we learn, is controlled by an alien intelligence that is referred to merely as “those that control the lightning”.
Norma becomes obsessed with the button, starting at it for hours while she and Arthur argue the moral issue that they will be playing God with someone else’s life. The rest of the film deals with the consequences of the couple’s actions.
Richard Kelly’s screenplay is all over the map but not once does it land at a destination that involves any logic or coherency. We get the fact that some alien intelligence is testing mankind with this game of ethical choices but Kelly, also the Director, doesn’t back it up with anything tangible. The only hints we get is the film being set in the 1970’s at the time of the launch of the Viking Mars probes.
Diaz is overly melodramatic although you have a fondness for the innate goodness of her character. Langella is the best thing about the film. He is equal parts sinister and sensitive, villain and hero and the film is at its best when he is onscreen.
The simple lesson here is that a ten-page story does not a film make, at least not in unskilled hands.
Extras
The only extra is a short interview with Richard Matheson who relates the background of developing the original story.
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I had high hopes for this when I saw the trailer. Having read the short story and liking Kelly's work I thought this would finally be that flick to push Kelly into the mainstream and such. Well, while I still like this flick it does leave something to be desired.
I would agree with the grade but would say more of a solid C rather than a C-.