The Box

Seen at: Carmike 10 in Fort Collins, 4:20 p.m. on Nov. 10

Ugh---more aliens. That makes three alien movies in a row. Sorry to spoil it for you, by the way.

This didn't look like a movie about aliens. I thought it was going to be a government-conspiracy thriller, a Twilight Zone genre story about a young couple who receive a mysterious box, with the offer that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars, but someone they don't know will die. It was an intriguing set-up, and for the first act, it completely worked.

I especially liked that it was a period piece, set in 1976 in suburban Virginia. I didn't expect that. I was hooked. I wanted to see where it was going.

But this movie isn't a thriller---it's science fiction. You learn this at the mid point of the movie, and then the movie just disappears down the rat hole of weird alien phenomena with CGI magic. That could have been ok, if somehow the story had wrapped it all up at the end, but it doesn't. It just gets weirder and weirder all the way to the end. We never really learn why most of it is happening. We don't get explanations. We're just supposed to be in awe of all the strange stuff, and accept it as somehow interesting. It isn't. That's not the way movies are supposed to work.

Also it has completely the wrong resolution. The gun should have had blanks in it. That's all I'm gonna say. That would have been a much better twist. The writers totally failed here.

By the end, I had totally rejected the story. What a shame. Such a fun set-up.

Verdict: a waste of a good premise.