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The Box
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Final Verdict: [Just... Bad]
The Box
Psychological Thriller / English / 2009
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've been meaning to see this ever since the trailer. A couple receive a box with a button in it. If they press the button, they receive a million dollars. The catch is that somebody they don't know will die.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Beyond the premise, this movie falls short on what it promises to deliver. Sure enough it's revealed that accumulation of the results of these kinds of tests result in some sort of "altruism coefficient" which determines whether some unseen alien race terminates the planet, but this information comes very late in the movie and it's never expanded upon, ultimately leaving more questions than were answered. Really, this movie sounds like the plot of a Twilight Zone episode, but never really evokes the sort of thoughtfulness you'd expect from one.
Oh. Wait. It was a Twilight Zone episode.
Hold on, I'm going to go watch that.
Okay, well that was mildly entertaining for how ridiculously over-acted it was, but ****ing seriously, the Twilight Zone episode is basically the first 15-20 minutes of the movie. The package arrives, it contains the "button unit", it says wait till 8 o' clock, Main Girl waits and talks to G-Man alone who says she'll get 200,000 dollars if she pushes the button, and someone she doesn't know will die. She and her husband argue over it and her husband, as in the movie, opens the thing and reveals there isn't even anything inside to suggest that pressing the button will have a real-world effect on anything. Eventually Main Girl presses it on impulse, G-Man shows up, hands over the money and leaves, saying he's going to reprogram it and give it to somebody they don't know under the same conditions.
In terms of concept, the Twilight Zone episode is superior, if only for the fact that it ends on an anti-climax, but with fridge logic reveals that the "somebody they don't know" conditions implies that they too can be victimized by somebody else in the same way, implying a Golden Rule-style morality lesson.
According to Wikipedia however, the original short story both the movie and episode were based on ended still differently:
Now why didn't either end like that? If the episode had seeded some doubt as to the nature of the husband's behavior, like suggested he'd been cheating or gambling or concealing something from his wife, we needn't really really have seen what that was to get a payoff from it, here being to have the viewer question what constitutes "knowing" somebody. I think that would have been a much better ending, ironically even more befitting for The Twilight Zone than what was actually made into a Twilight Zone episode.
The movie honestly seems like the worst iteration of the three because it spends a grotesque amount of time having the characters investigate the G-Man revealing him to be some NSA guy involved in a lightning strike that gave him super powers for some completely unnecessary reason. That, on top of some ridiculously convoluted plot jumps involving some entirely unexplored teleportation system involving water which is lampshaded to not even be real, WHAT EVEN is the point of setting up some "pick one of three doors, one leads to salvation, two lead to damnation" bit when you've already established that this couple pressed the button? Is this not the sole means of determining the altruism coefficient, or is this really some entirely irrelevant sideplot about seeking the afterlife through this alien technology?
And you know, really, when it comes down to presenting this test as a reliable metric of whether someone is moral or not, why in the **** do you allow the characters in both the episode and the movie to open up the box and show it to be empty? Doesn't that further call the entire idea into question? Isn't this all pretty dubious to begin with anyway, I mean G-man does absolutely nothing to suggest what he's saying is true and only in the movie does he reveal the cash on him to show how serious he is.
EVEN THEN though, it's not as if you could be held accountable for murder in such a situation, if these guys have inexplicably decided to shoot some random person depending on whether or not some random other people press a completely unrelated button, how can you genuinely hold those people accountable, PARTICULARLY when the entire prospect seems absurd and is entirely unsubstantiated on it's face.
The only way I can conceive to rationalize this concept realistically, is if pressing the button would leave a finger print which the bad guys would then be functionally paying for to frame their pre-determined murders, BUUUUUUT even then, why pay to leave a fingerprint at all in the first place? And on top of that, why leave evidence that could be traced back to people who witnessed you?
As ridiculous as this is, even this makes more sense than the mindboggling scenario in the movie where the presumed deaths are apparently caused by COMPLETELY unrelated scenarios going on simultaneously; one guy shooting his spouse in the chest for pressing the button which somehow saves their child, which then somehow then serves as the first death caused by Main Guy and Main Girl pressing the button which, for reasons undisclosed, blinds and deafens their child, only to be resolved by a second deal which involves Main Guy shooting Main Girl which serves as a death caused by pressing the button by AN ENTIRELY UNRELATED COUPLE...
IT MAKES NO ******* SENSE.
Pressing the button in the initial deal seems to do nothing but coincidentally line up with the time of death cause by killing one's spouse as part of an inevitable follow-up deal. THAT. MEANS. NOTHING. Pressing the button does nothing! Whether you press it or not, that same person will still die because it's predicated on entirely different characters making entirely different decisions!
This movie is crap!
Oh. Wait. It was a Twilight Zone episode.
Hold on, I'm going to go watch that.
Okay, well that was mildly entertaining for how ridiculously over-acted it was, but ****ing seriously, the Twilight Zone episode is basically the first 15-20 minutes of the movie. The package arrives, it contains the "button unit", it says wait till 8 o' clock, Main Girl waits and talks to G-Man alone who says she'll get 200,000 dollars if she pushes the button, and someone she doesn't know will die. She and her husband argue over it and her husband, as in the movie, opens the thing and reveals there isn't even anything inside to suggest that pressing the button will have a real-world effect on anything. Eventually Main Girl presses it on impulse, G-Man shows up, hands over the money and leaves, saying he's going to reprogram it and give it to somebody they don't know under the same conditions.
In terms of concept, the Twilight Zone episode is superior, if only for the fact that it ends on an anti-climax, but with fridge logic reveals that the "somebody they don't know" conditions implies that they too can be victimized by somebody else in the same way, implying a Golden Rule-style morality lesson.
According to Wikipedia however, the original short story both the movie and episode were based on ended still differently:
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
In the original short story, the plot is resolved differently. Norma presses the button, and receives the money—after her husband dies in a train incident where Arthur is pushed onto the tracks (the money was the no-fault insurance settlement, which is $50,000 instead of the $200,000 in the Twilight Zone episode). A despondent Norma asks the stranger why her husband was the one who was killed. The stranger replies, "Do you really think you knew your husband?"
The movie honestly seems like the worst iteration of the three because it spends a grotesque amount of time having the characters investigate the G-Man revealing him to be some NSA guy involved in a lightning strike that gave him super powers for some completely unnecessary reason. That, on top of some ridiculously convoluted plot jumps involving some entirely unexplored teleportation system involving water which is lampshaded to not even be real, WHAT EVEN is the point of setting up some "pick one of three doors, one leads to salvation, two lead to damnation" bit when you've already established that this couple pressed the button? Is this not the sole means of determining the altruism coefficient, or is this really some entirely irrelevant sideplot about seeking the afterlife through this alien technology?
And you know, really, when it comes down to presenting this test as a reliable metric of whether someone is moral or not, why in the **** do you allow the characters in both the episode and the movie to open up the box and show it to be empty? Doesn't that further call the entire idea into question? Isn't this all pretty dubious to begin with anyway, I mean G-man does absolutely nothing to suggest what he's saying is true and only in the movie does he reveal the cash on him to show how serious he is.
EVEN THEN though, it's not as if you could be held accountable for murder in such a situation, if these guys have inexplicably decided to shoot some random person depending on whether or not some random other people press a completely unrelated button, how can you genuinely hold those people accountable, PARTICULARLY when the entire prospect seems absurd and is entirely unsubstantiated on it's face.
The only way I can conceive to rationalize this concept realistically, is if pressing the button would leave a finger print which the bad guys would then be functionally paying for to frame their pre-determined murders, BUUUUUUT even then, why pay to leave a fingerprint at all in the first place? And on top of that, why leave evidence that could be traced back to people who witnessed you?
As ridiculous as this is, even this makes more sense than the mindboggling scenario in the movie where the presumed deaths are apparently caused by COMPLETELY unrelated scenarios going on simultaneously; one guy shooting his spouse in the chest for pressing the button which somehow saves their child, which then somehow then serves as the first death caused by Main Guy and Main Girl pressing the button which, for reasons undisclosed, blinds and deafens their child, only to be resolved by a second deal which involves Main Guy shooting Main Girl which serves as a death caused by pressing the button by AN ENTIRELY UNRELATED COUPLE...
IT MAKES NO ******* SENSE.
Pressing the button in the initial deal seems to do nothing but coincidentally line up with the time of death cause by killing one's spouse as part of an inevitable follow-up deal. THAT. MEANS. NOTHING. Pressing the button does nothing! Whether you press it or not, that same person will still die because it's predicated on entirely different characters making entirely different decisions!
This movie is crap!