2000s SF film

[peteryoung]

The Box, 2009, USA   DIRECTED BY RICHARD KELLY
I'm interested to now read the story by Richard Matheson, 'Button, Button', on which The Box is based to see if its many grafted-on plot elements were ever really necessary. I somehow doubt it, but the premise of the story is still a neat 'what if?' moral dilemma: a million dollars is yours if you simply press the red button in the box that is left on your doorstep. The bad news is that someone, somewhere in the world, will die as a result. Still want that easy million? Cameron Diaz gives a decent enough performance as the woman who says "yes", although the full cast never really gels into anything like a seamless whole. James Marsden as her NASA scientist husband just can't quite pull it off and too often seems in awe of acting alongside Diaz, while the true star is the wonderfully restrained Frank Langella as the badly mutilated Arlington Steward – that facial disfigurement he sports is grotesquely eye-catching and helps to elevate Langella's performance far above everyone else's. But the film also included a bit of unnecessary science fictional referencing (Arthur C. Clarke and Astounding magazine to name two) seemingly just to wear its genre identity on its sleeve. Up to a third of the way through it has neither the look nor the feel of an SF movie, and it's only after these cues that you get an idea of the film's likely direction. Where it ended up didn't disappoint me – somewhere far on the other side of the story's original Twilight Zone adaptation (of which Matheson strongly disapproved) – but I found my interest flagging a little about halfway through because there seemed to be a few too many extra plot strands to tie together in what should have been a more dynamic screenplay. This isn't a film that's ever much more than the sum of its parts, then, despite its overtly science fictional destination, but it does have its moments, and they all belong to Frank Langella.