Watched “The Box” this weekend (among other stuff, I’ll post about it later this week).
It’s an interesting movie; it’s based on a 1970’s short story called “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, and was adapted to an episode of “Twilight Zone” in the 80’s… my final idea about the movie is that the story is much more suited to a format like “The Twilight Zone” than an actual full-lenght feature-film…
Although the movie doesn’t become “boring” per-se, it has lots of dead moments where not revelations are comming and that seems to be just re-hashing what has already gone on…
The acting is good enough, with Frank Langella being awesome as Steward (he’s super-creepy, as the character calls for it); the special effects are not cutting edge, but they do their job (some of the work in the scar on Langella’s face looks too CGI, but other than that, it’s ok).
The story revolves around a couple to which a mysterious man gives a box with a button. If they press that button, one person they don’t know will die, and they’ll get one million dollars. The movie than proceeds into analysis of human behavior and the consequences of actions.
On a final note, the movie is quite nice (a bit slow for some)… I give it a 7/10.
Later this week, don’t miss the review on “Jonah Hex”, and the introduction of new featured articles in everyone’s favorite format: lists!
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Now for the spoiler part (stop reading if you want to check out the movie):
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Really, stop reading… I’m telling you, it kind of makes the movie more boring if you know this…
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You’re really persistent, aren’t you?
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Fine, fine, have it your way…
This is all supposed to be a big test by a super-advanced race of alien beings, trying to figure out if mankind can be selfless or not. If not, they’ll destroy us all, like they did on Mars millions of years ago…
The silly part, in my opinion is the nature of the test: people seem to press the button just because they don’t actually believe in the “bad” consequence, they just don’t want to miss out on the “good” consequence, and that seems to me that it’s not a good metric of human behavior… Specially, it seems too falible to be used by a super-alien race…