The Netflix Spain production tells another story within the same post-apocalyptic people-go-kill-themselves universe as the first Bird Box in 2018 with Sandra Bullock. The first look reveal last month was just an "announcement", this has more footage. When you can feel a film dragging, all production elements suffer."Whatever you do, don't open your eyes!" Netflix has unveiled an actual teaser trailer for the spin-off film titled Bird Box Barcelona (also known as Blindly in Spanish). Maybe that's due to a story stretched thin to fit Netflix's data-driven longer running times. Bird Box Barcelona may stand on its own ideas regarding Sebastián's journey, but everything else resembles a run-of-the-mill, post-Walking Dead dystopia.
BIRD BOX EYES MOVIE
The Pastors themselves generated better end-times doom and gloom in 2009's viral outbreak indie Carriers - a movie with less budget but infinitely more impact and presence. It's also a problem that they’ve made a movie with such an indistinct look and feel. The Pastors try to keep momentum building with an explosion blast here and a metal-mashing bus crash there, but their execution is stop-and-go. This is as good as Bird Box Barcelona gets – there's just so much more movie wrapped around these morally contemplative moments. Tragedies in Sebastián's past become easily manipulated as we learn more about the character, displaying the volatility of human emotions and how easily they (and we) can be controlled. The religious tendency to hurriedly declare unknowns as glorious signs from above without assessing danger or reality is questioned: Leonardo Sbaraglia plays a clergyman seemingly serving Earth's new merciless overlords. This is a psychological thriller that doesn't thrill, but its themes are sound. Intended shock and awe withers, squeezing in these interludes from months past like padding that subtracts from the overall experience. Cuts between current events and exposition flashbacks become redundant at a point because we already know the outcome – we quickly suss out where these flashbacks will conclude. The Pastors take a gamble on the script's structure by subverting how horror movies typically attempt to keep audiences guessing, which is refreshing at first but tedious within a two-hour runtime. But in the long run, those traits hurt Bird Box Barcelona, which shapeshifts between a slasher as told from the inside (minus the cutthroat scares or whodunit mystery), and a father-daughter drama that seems to serve a contrasting science-fiction tone. Sebastián quickly asserts himself as a curious, then deeply complex leading character for reasons that won’t be divulged in this review.
At its best, Bird Box Barcelona exploits humanity’s desire to trust thy neighbor by showing a billion ways untested faith can go abysmally wrong. Secrets stoke unease as survivors question a priest's devotion in the name of miracles or an outsider's claims to know where life-saving generators exist, and performances sustain interpersonal tension between shifty eyes or disbelieving hesitations. The Pastors indulge in societal breakdowns after floating Lovecraftian deathmongers become commonplace, putting more stress on character interactions.
With Barbarian standout Georgina Campbell playing fellow survivor and English psychiatrist Claire and Babylon’s Diego Calva as brainy scientist Octavio, Bird Box Barcelona boasts a stellar ensemble. A continuation with standalone appeal, Bird Box Barcelona earns praise for distancing itself from the first film, but ultimately suffers as flimsier screenplay "logic" plagues a story too desperately focused on being different. It's a more supernatural examination of the nondescript entities eradicating Earth's population, digging deeper into cultist factions and religious parallels that refuse to recycle the original film's more straightforward survival tale.
The Pastor brothers approach Bird Box like how Max Brooks' zombie novel World War Z tells individual tales of undead mayhem across the globe. No Sandra Bullock, no American backdrops, and almost no connection to Malerman's follow-up novel Malorie.
BIRD BOX EYES SERIES
Filmmakers David and Àlex Pastor take the series overseas in Bird Box Barcelona, less a direct sequel and more a simultaneous-yet-unconnected anthology chapter. Netflix's adaptation of author Josh Malerman's post-apocalyptic novel Bird Box was a sensational hit for the platform in 2018 – which makes a sequel seem ridiculously overdue.
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