One of the most common complaints about Inception (and don't worry, there will be no spoilers for that movie here) is that the stakes weren't big enough and that people never really felt any real sense of threat. I agreed with that but a film that made a fairly unmistakable mistake when it comes to stakes is Richard Kelly's "The Box". (And yes, there will be spoilers for The Box but honestly reading this will save your from spoiling two hours by actually watching the movie.)

If there was a charlatan filmmaker out there right now, Kelly would get my vote. His film usually seem to be about something greater and often are intended to be about something bigger but, in the end, they're all kind of nonsense. If you loved "Donnie Darko" then don't listen to the director's commentary on the DVD because you start to realize that there's really no logical master plan behind it. "Southland Tales" is interesting on its face but is pretty shallow at its core. And so it goes with "The Box" a film that has some intriguing parts but halfway through you start to realize that it's not going anywhere.

The biggest miscue that the film made was that midway through the film, you learned that the box that the couple received was part of a bigger plan by some mysterious higher power ("the ones who controlled the lightning") and if enough human beings pushed the button, mankind would be wiped off the face of the earth. Pretty heavy stuff. After that, the film went back to the story of James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, the random couple we'd been following. A couple who had already decided whether or not they would push the button. A couple who from here on out really had no more part to play in the fate of the world as we know it. But that was it. That was who we then followed for the rest of the movie.

To me, this seems like a fairly rookie mistake for any screenwriter. You simply can't introduce stakes that are FAR bigger than that of your main characters and then ignore it and just go back to the more personal stakes of said characters. You can't have the fate of the known world be a random factoid that you never really go back to in favor of the fate of some random couple. It's hard to care about whether Marsden or Diaz's characters save themselves when they might just be wiped off the planet anyway.

Kelly does a great job building tension for most of the movie but once the answers start coming, the film starts going wrong. I'd really like to see him work on a script by somebody else because I feel like he's a strong director but his writing kind of lets him down. He's like a poor man's M. Night Shymalan in that way.

Anyway, if you are interested in "The Box", you might as well just watch the old "Twilight Zone" episode that was based on the same short story as this film was. (And as you can probably guess, Kelly made up the last 3/4's of the film since it had nothing to do with the actual short story itself. It was like a half hour high quality remake of the Twilight Zone episode and then a ninety minute a fan fiction sequel to it. Without further ado, here's the first part of "Button, Button." (And if you don't want to deal with the character stuff in the beginning, the plot gets going at the 4:30 mark.)