The Justice

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Arthur (James Marsden) and Norma (Cameron Diaz) ponder an offer that will bring them a financial windfall through the press of a button.

The Box, is the newest movie from director Richard Kelly, known best for his masterpiece head-scratcher Donnie Darko (2001) and the disastrous head-exploder that was Southland Tales (2006). He has stated that he wants to make The Box a "commercial film," and it shows. The movie has big name stars like Cameron Diaz and Frank Langella, and the first part of the movie plays like a tight, intriguing thriller. But then something happens: It starts getting weirder. By the end of the movie, the plot becomes so strange that we are reminded that even though Kelly is trying to make a commercial film, he's not a commercial director.

The movie concerns Arthur and Norma Lewis, played by James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, respectively, a young couple in 1976 Virginia that has a young son named Walter. One night, they find a box on their doorstep that contains a button and cryptic instructions to wait for a man named Arlington Steward. Over the course of the day, both Arthur and Norma encounter setbacks at work that leave the family strapped for cash. Into this situation comes Steward (Frank Langella), a man with burn wounds covering half his face and an explanation of what the box does. If Norma and Arthur push the button, someone they don't know will die, and they will receive $1 million dollars. If they don't, then he will take the box back and they will get nothing.

To this point, the movie follows the basic plot of "Button, Button," an episode of The Twilight Zone that was itself based off of Richard Masterson's short story of the same name. But a half-hour Twilight Zone episode couldn't be spread out over the almost two-hour running time of The Box, so the Lewises start to look into just who Arlington Steward is and for whom he is working. The more information is uncovered, the more outlandish and confusing the story gets. It's shown that the box involves Mars, lightning, mind control and even the afterlife. These twists would have been much easier to swallow had they been sufficiently explained, but Kelly often skims over many of the ideas presented, leaving the viewer with a rudimentary but insufficient explanation for all that is going on and therefore the sense that something was either left out or forgotten in the plot.

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