2023, David & Alex Pastor (Carriers) -- Netflix
I just rewatched Bird Box and wrote about it for the first time as a fill-in for The Dark Year. Its a decent apocalyptic horror movie about creatures (we never see them; we don't know what they are) who inspire people to commit suicide, should you gaze upon them. The movie barely explained what was going, nary a "news stories in the background" as its all "the day off". In the not-long-after the only addition to the world-building was in the form of people who had looked upon the creatures, but didn't die --- they just went mad, and became focused on making sure other survivors did look. Like zombie movies, the greater enemy is other people.
Like its predecessor, this movie dances back and forth between "the day" and current day, some months after the event ended the world. But it does something unexpected -- the viewpoint is from one of the "seers" (get it? see-ers or prophets? how clever) who is convinced this is all a biblical event. He believes the people who die at his hands, never directly, are actually having their souls released to go to Heaven. He even sees a bright spot of light launch itself into the sky. A Bad Guy is the main character. But can we follow him through a movie entirely as one deluded by the insanity imposed by monsters? No, not in a mainstream flick; this ones finds a spot of redemption for him.
I honestly dislike the need for sequels to follow the beats of their predecessor. Sure, there are trope laden ideals in survivalist post-apocalypse stories where there is a road to be followed, a safe haven to be sought, but since this movie already started with a twist on ideals, why not skip the whole road story? Because it provides a frame work for the story to work upon. The journey from the last place that Sebastián (Mario Casas, Los hombres de Paco) dispatches some survivors to a safe haven for his next batch of victims is how we are allowed to see Sebastián's transformation, his redemption. A to B, down the river, up the road, salvation at the end. Death and thrilling action along the way.
As a rework to the existing predecessor story, A Quiet Place: Day One did a better job. Despite my lackluster reaction to that movie, as I was expectedly comparing it to its own predecessor, it was just so much better done than this, connected you more to the story, the circumstance and the characters involved. It did not use up each of the journeyers as fodder, but presented them as people. In the end Sebastián's redemption is interesting but the overall journey was not.
I find it interesting how streaming (mainly Amazon and Netflix) are experimenting with this idea of international sequels to their modest hits. I wonder what drives the decision as to which country they will do the sequel in. Was Brasil a particularly big market for the first Bird Box?
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