Early one morning someone leaves a package on the doorstep of Arthur (James Marsden) and Norma Lewis’s (Cameron Diaz) Virginia home. Inside the package is a black box, nondescript except for the red button that sits tops it. Later that day they are visited by Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), who informs them that if they push the button, they will receive one million dollars in cash.

But there’s a catch--when they push the button, someone they don’t know will die. Arthur and Norma spend several days wrestling over whether or not they should push the button, and their final decision sets off a chain of events more life-changing than they could possibly have imagined.

CRITIQUE

Donnie Darko auteur Richard Kelly’s sophomore offering Southland Tales was a bloated, pretentious, self-important, incomprehensible mess that crammed ten pounds of mind-numbing awful into a five-pound bag. My initial reaction to that movie was one of extreme, uncontrollable hatred. Some people found the movie ambitious and thought-provoking, but I came away hoping Kelly’s career would soon come to an end.

However, this obviously didn’t happen, as we now have The Box, which was--surprise, surprise--given the go-ahead before Southland Tales had its disastrous blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Kelly has described this latest film as an attempt to combine commercial material with his signature artistic sensibilities. I guess that’s his way of saying he wanted to sucker mainstream audiences into sitting through another of his precious little exercises in lugubrious, self-indulgent nonsense, because that’s exactly what The Box is.

The Box is ostensibly based on speculative fiction god Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button.” Many people remember the story, which was originally published in Playboy back in 1970, from its adaptation as part of the ‘80s revival of The Twilight Zone, this despite the fact said adaptation didn’t turn out so well; it’s rather clumsily executed, and the ending of Matheson’s teleplay was rewritten by others, causing him to distance himself from the project. (Despite this, I immediately thought of the episode when I saw the trailer for The Box; it and the extraordinarily creepy adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s “Shatterday” are the only ones I can actually remember.)

Matheson’s original is a great story, tight and compact, with the sort of kick-in-the-slats ending he is famous for. Kelly claims to have been taken by the story when he was ten, but it’s more likely he was taken by the Twilight Zone episode, as he incorporated the ending Matheson loathed into his script (that’s also the age he would have been when it was first broadcast). And that ending comes roughly forty-five minutes into The Box, which leaves another hour and change for Kelly to run rampant with his own contributions (which come out of nowhere and get increasingly silly as they unfold), contributions that weren’t even hinted at in the movie’s advertising. There’s good reason for this, as had the few poor souls who actually ventured into theaters when this movie opened (there weren’t many of them, meaning Kelly is hopefully getting even closer to becoming a pariah in Hollywood) known exactly what they were in for, it’s likely they would stayed home.

Honestly, the trailers for this movie (which had its release date shuffled more times than a deck of cards at the Beau Rivage, which is a pretty good indication the distributor knew they were fighting a losing battle) are about as close to false advertising as trailers can get. Kelly has not so much adapted Matheson’s story as he has used its familiarity to allow him to construct another vehicle for his brand of ponderous pomposity. Remember what happened with Stephen King’s “The Lawnmower Man”? Same thing here, more or less--a well-known work by a famous author gets co-opted by a filmmaker who uses it for his own disastrous devices and who deserves all of the scorn and invective he’ll inevitably find hurled his way.

As is evidenced here, Kelly longs to be Stanley Kubrick. His visual stylistics owe so much to Kubrick (including some out-and-out theft) it’s ridiculous. Watching The Box is at times like watching a Kubrick clip-reel, with shots from his entire career cherry-picked and strung together without any rhyme or reason. But Kelly lacks the ability to make his shots add up to anything; Kubrick painted with a camera, while Kelly (who still doesn’t understand the difference between deliberate and slow as far as pacing goes) simply takes something he thinks looks good and splices it together with something else he thinks looks good; if they don’t add to anything, so be it. That’s the problem with his script, too. Kelly apes Kubrick visually, but he seems to have learned plotting from David Lynch; random moments and characters pile up, and the story branches off and then branches off from the branches.

Whereas Lynch creates his own narrative microcosm and imbues it with a dream logic that works within the context of that microcosm (and I mean when such an approach works, as in Mulholland Dr., not in the nose-thumbing condescension of something like Fire Walk With Me), Kelly’s writing often seems to be incomprehensible and off-putting simply for the sake of being incomprehensible or off-putting.

There are people who think those two qualities are synonymous with profundity, but that’s something I think is foolish. Kelly doesn’t bend genres or run off on tangents for any real purpose, unless of course his purpose is attempting to cover up just how trite, hollow, and obvious his ideas are. The ultimate statement of The Box is more or less the same as that of “Button, Button,” but it only took Matheson ten lean pages to do what Kelly takes two muddled hours to do, and Kelly’s additions fail to bring anything to the proceedings, instead falling back on a science fiction trope so old it was put out to pasture back when an issue of Astounding still cost a quarter.

Having said all of that, I think Kelly the writer probably owes more to Philip K. Dick than anyone else. Much like Dick, he’ll use any idea that pops into his head, and he also shares Dick’s tendency to abandon ideas at the drop of a hat. This being the case, my reactions to the men’s work are remarkably similar: I lose interest the moment they seem to. Then again, he has a bit in common with Ayn Rand; her ideas weren’t half as profound as she or her acolytes seem to think, and she desperately needed a self-edit switch.

Given just how simplistic Kelly’s ideas are, I don’t understand why some of the movie’s proponents are using the old “you just don’t get it” argument when countering detractors. I get it and still hate it. Besides, there’s nothing really complex here. If the movie in incomprehensible, it’s not because of its so-called cerebral aspects (of which there really are none), but rather because Kelly continually injects ideas, characters, and incidents that ultimately mean nothing.

There’s a character here who shows up early on to antagonize Diaz and then help Marsden, after which he vanishes from the movie. Who he is or how he knows what he knows is never even hinted at (which happens a lot here--characters know things they shouldn’t, don’t know things they should, and constantly show up at key moments with no explanation as to how or why they got there); he’s nothing more than an awkward plot device Kelly drops in when he needs him (read: when he’s backed himself into a narrative corner) and then removes after his purpose has been served.

There’s also a character who is made to looks important only to disappear for an hour and suddenly return out of thin air in order to give Marsden some vital information, information this character couldn’t possibly know. (Much of this information comes from a training manual employed by the movie’s “antagonists,” and it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t expect them to have or need, much less leave lying around for someone else to pick up and use against them.

Kelly used a similar tome to get himself out of a narrative logjam in Donnie Darko, but at least there he tried to make it fit, whereas here he simply pulls it out of a certain excretory orifice and drops it in.) And after this guy has served his purpose (which apparently includes opening up a couple of huge plot holes and logic flaws), he’s dispatched in a scene that features a menacing--and telepathic--Santa Claus and a violent car crash that kills one person while leaving another completely unscathed. (I’ve been treading carefully here as a courtesy to anyone who doesn’t want the movie spoiled, so I won’t go too far into it, but I have to wonder why the “antagonists” would have to bother with a car crash.)

Before he’s inevitably overcome by the horrendous dialogue and inanities of the story, Langella turns in quite a good performance. The same cannot be said for Marsden and Diaz, who are simply awful. The former wears the same blank expression throughout the entire movie (it’s the same one he donned for X-Men and Superman Returns), while the latter’s attempts to emote are almost as painful as her attempts to affect a southern accent. But Kelly is as much to blame as his stars; his directing of his actors has been uniform across his three movies, not seeming to realize it’s impossible for an audience to care about characters if they come across as if they rolled off an assembly line.

THE VIDEO

Kelly’s intent was to make the movie look like it was shot in 1976, the year in which it’s set, and this release’s 2.40:1/1080p transfer--encoded with VC-1 onto a 25GB disc--does a good job approximating that look.

The digital photography (Kelly has stated he was inspired to use Panavision Genesis cameras by David Fincher’s use of them on Zodiac, meaning he’s dragging yet another far more talented individual’s name through the mud) is intentionally soft and hazy, and it looks as if available light (which wavers between very soft and blindingly blown-out) was used as often as possible.

The image can go quite flat at times, colors sometimes bleed, and the level of visible detail fluctuates like mad, but these are all consequences of Kelly’s aesthetic choices. Some grain appears to have been artificially inserted into the image, which wasn’t a bad idea, as it helps prevent the photography from looking digitally unnatural.

THE AUDIO

The ‘70s vibe extends to the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, which often sounds as if it’s been remixed from thirty-something-year-old elements, but in this case that’s not really a good thing. Dialogue can be quite difficult to make out at times, bass is uneven, and the volume level fluctuates wildly. The music, however, sounds quite good. (This is all characteristic of the soundtracks for Kelly’s previous flicks, so maybe this is just another of his peculiarities.)

French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 dubs are also included; English, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

As much as I hated the movie, I absolutely loved the commentary by Richard Kelly. Why? Because Kelly repeatedly uses the phrase “I don’t know” while stammering through a gobbledygook-filled (and failed) attempt to explain the plot. And because he mentions Sartre so often you’d think he’s getting a hundred dollars every time he does. And because his lame attempts to deflect criticism for the script’s misogynistic elements are more offensive than the misogynistic elements themselves.   

The following, many of which are exclusive to the Blu-ray, are presented in high-definition:

The Box: Grounded in Reality (10 minutes) explores the autobiographical material Kelly wove into his script.

Three music video prequels (9 minutes) aren’t music videos at all but are rather compilations of deleted scenes accompanied by passages from the movie’s core.

Visual Effects Revealed (4 minutes) breaks down some of the CG effects employed in the movie (including the unsuccessful attempts to make the Boston locations look like Richmond). 

Richard Matheson: In His Own Words (5 minutes) is a brief chat with the famed author.

As is the case with most of Warner’s new releases, some (but not all) copies of this release also contain a DVD that houses both a standard-def version of the movie and a digital copy.

FINAL THOUGHTS