As a fan of science fiction allegory, social experiment, "The Twilight Zone" and the thriller genre -- no less all those elements combined -- Richard Kelly and his film "The Box" should've at least won me over, but it doesn't. It can't even decide if it wants to remain completely mysterious or explicitly tell us what's going on and any film that has to contemplate that is too complex for its own good.

With any story this daring, there's potential for something meaningful. "The Box" does let you glimpse it and draw a few interesting conclusions, but through intellectual jail bars placed before our eyes by the myriad of plot contrivances. In other words, too many plot elements exist in in the film that keep us from ever putting our mind around what Kelly is trying to say. Although he starts simply by focusing on a couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) and their child making an ethical decision, the scope widens to include everything from Arthur C. Clarke references to mindless drones to some indiscernible notion of the afterlife.

This beginning piece is based on Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button," which was a short story turned into a "Twilight Zone" episode. In "The Box," a mysterious man with a half-burned face played by Frank Langella drops off a box with a button in it at the doorstep of Norma and Arthur Lewis and their son Walter. He later comes back and gives Norma a proposition: don't press the button and nothing happens, or press the button and receive one million dollars and subsequently someone, anywhere in the world, whom they don't know will die.

Well, Norma, a teacher, just lost her teacher tuition discount for her son and Arthur's application to be an astronaut was just denied and despite living in a nice looking house in Richmond, Virginia they apparently have no money, so it's not hard to figure out ultimately what they'll do. After all, don't press the button and there's no film -- not that some people who sit through this would've minded that in retrospect.

As with his cult hit "Donnie Darko," Kelly keeps "The Box" fascinatingly creepy. It starts with the colors, the classic string soundtrack from the band Arcade Fire and some peculiar Easter eggs and moves on to more jarring occurrences. There is never a point where things get so absurd that you don't care what happens in the end, even if there's a chance the end could be terribly unsatisfying. It's one of few saving graces for "The Box," but perhaps even this is only for those intrigued by high concept sci-fi mystery that parallels human nature no matter how vague.

When any thriller collapses somewhere after the midway point, you can usually blame the fact that too many occurrences in need of explaining were written in order for the writer to achieve his desired end. When James Marsden gets hit in a car by a truck and comes out of a giant light warehouse and that ultimately never gets explained, its degrading to the viewer.

The real trouble with "The Box" is how ambitiously it tries to combine the ideas of intelligent life/space exploration with religious notions of life, death and what might come after as well as numerous other elements too many and too difficult to explain. Kelly found that balance between time travel and inter-relationship drama in "Donnie Darko" but "The Box" implodes on itself by severing its little social experiment from the characters with too much unexplained phenomena.

~Steven C

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I'm in a real minority on this film, The Box. Judging by the reviewers people seem to either love or hate it. They all seem to feel that it didn't live up to director Richard Kelly's masterpiece Donnie Darko. It's a matter of degree it seems how far it fell from Donnie Darko.

Looking at The Box I remembered as a kid Marvin Miller delivering million dollar tax free checks to unsuspecting people with a condition of anonymity in The Millionaire. Watching this film it was like Stephen King had rewritten a dark version of The Millionaire.

James Marsden, a NASA scientist and his wife Cameron Diaz, a school teacher are having problems with their finances. In addition Diaz because of a childhood accident has a deformed foot.

We are human and who could resist an offer made by a mysterious scarred stranger played in the creepiest manner possible by Frank Langella who comes to their home and Diaz gets the gift of a box with a red button. Push that button and she and Marsden receive a Marvin Miller gift of a million tax free dollars. Only that somewhere in this world someone will die as a result of that button being pushed.

It's Diaz who pushes it and they get the money, but some consciences are stirred. Marsden starts to investigate Langella and finds out this guy has been enhanced medically and metaphysically after being struck by lightning though he was left with that disfigurement.

At this point the film does get right down to the metaphysical. Whatever forces have enhanced Langella seem to be playing some kind of cosmic joke on mankind and some people are being selected as metaphysical lab rats. Experiments like this and Langella assures us this is not the only one seem to be set up so that frail humankind will fail in being altruistic.

The Box falls quite a bit short and its conclusions are non-existent. Still the cast performs well and Frank Langella will give you nightmares. Don't let the little ones see it.

THE BOX is the apparent adaptation of a short story (entitled Button, Button) by excellent genre writer Richard Matheson, in which a suburban couple are presented with a moral dilemma: they're given a box with a button to press; if they press it they'll receive one million dollars, but a stranger will die in the process.

This is the kind of one-line premise that would have ably supported an old episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE or THE OUTER LIMITS, but sadly as a feature film it's a real bore. Director Richard Kelly attempts to bring the same menacing atmosphere to the movie as he did to his debut classic, DONNIE DARKO, but the two films can't be mentioned in the same breath. For where everything worked in his original film, it fails this time around.

THE BOX fails to overcome the sheer ludicrousness of its premise, and the constant, inexplicable sequences of characters being chased or stalked by strangers or encountering bizarre events are just irritating rather than anything else. By the time of the water test towards the end, the film has descended to the level of a dodgy SyFy Channel movie. It doesn't help that the acting is awful, particularly Cameron Diaz with her terrible Southern accent. Frank Langella is the only decent actor in the whole thing, and he's hidden behind a distracting CGI effect throughout. No, THE BOX bombed and for good reason: it's a movie that screams disaster and not in a good way.