In a world of overused movie tropes and tired apocalypse dramas, Netflix dared to say, “toucan play at that game.”

Netflix recently released an original movie starring Sandra Bullock called “Bird Box,” which took place in a world where most of civilization had been destroyed by an entity that instilled a death wish in those that look at it.

The viewer was immediately introduced to Bullock’s character Malorie, a take-no-crap, bitter and frankly unlovable character. She was accompanied by her two children, the very creatively named Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Boy (Julian Edwards).

The children are used to add a sense of purpose to Malorie’s will to survive when there is no real character development to show her growing into a person that cares about others.

This problem stems from a plot that can only be described as a mess. The structure itself is one that doesn’t normally work for thriller type movies and one that certainly didn’t work here.

Because the plot kept leaping back and forth from present day to five years ago when the apocalypse started, the scenes of the beginning were completely fruitless as you already knew that the majority of those characters would most likely not come into play later.

And they didn’t. Those characters all either died or left, making their role completely pointless as they served only to develop Bullock’s character. Notice I said pointless, because they didn’t even do that.

With the exception of one character that appears later in the movie, a character reappearance that was both meaningless and confusing, and Tom, Malorie’s love-interest, you could just skip the first hour and fifteen minutes of movie that took place in the past, and still understand what was going on.

Other than grossly misusing characters and making a movie primarily set-up, the plot was disappointing for another very important reason:

Bullock’s character is vastly under-developed. They chose to focus on the first part of the apocalypse, when she was still an unlikeable person, as opposed to devoting that screen time to character development, which would have been tremendously interesting to see in this type of role.

A story focused on personal development and one that is character-driven while still set in this environment would have been a peck of a lot better than the unpheasant, lifeless film Netflix released.