Songbird Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Songbird is available through PVOD on December 11. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Sure, one could deride the Michael Bay-produced Songbird as being a "wrong place, wrong time" dull dystopian dirge that exploits the isolation, panic, and misery most of us are currently experiencing in 2020. But even if you can shrug that off as a filmmaker's attempt to -- let's just say -- make chicken salad out of chicken s***, by crafting a ripped-from-the-headlines story that can be filmed in a mostly socially-distanced manner, Songbird is still a clumsy and boring example of reverse-engineering. The film's emaciated plot seems to only exist after everyone involved figured out what they couldn't do, and then worked up a story based on what was left. Songbird's setting is, well, a few years from now. COVID-19 has transformed into COVID-23. It's airborne and devastated the entire world, with 110 million dead globally. Some people are immune. The rest get herded into Quarantine Zones that are nothing more than shantytowns for the doomed and dying. This all unfurls quickly via an info dump montage filled with chaos and conspiracy theories. Then the movie drops us into a rather tedious, uninspired version of a nightmare future where everyone is permanently indoors except for the very few immune folks who get to treat the outside world like a "last man on Earth" playground. The impressively ravaged landscape is something we've seen countless times, in better films, so here it just feels wasted on an undercooked "What if?" scenario that was quickly shot this past summer. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/10/29/songbird-official-trailer"] Songbird has brief flashes of inspiration, like the idea that immune people are even more alone than everyone else because (as carriers) they can't see anyone, but as soon as one character insists that it makes them "Gods," because they can go sit in anyone's abandoned mansion, you realize how poorly nurtured the idea actually is. Overall, the entire story's a drab, paper-thin gimmick that never leaves the metaphoric room it's trapped itself in. Riverdale's KJ Apa plays Nico, an immune L.A. bike messenger who longs to head to Big Sur (which is rumored to be COVID-free) with his girlfriend, Sofia Carson's Sara, who he's never met in person. After Sara's roommate, her grandmother, tests positive for the sickness, Nico knows it won't be long before the Department of Sanitation shows up to shuffle Sara off to death's door. So, after too long of a set-up -- in which we meet shut-ins played by Craig Robinson, Demi Moore, Bradley Whitford, Alexandra Daddario, and Richard Jewell's Paul Walter Hauser -- Nico races all around the city to get Sara an immunity bracelet (which seems wholly irresponsible) while everyone else's story weaves together in massively uninteresting ways. Peter Stormare "Peter Stormare's" up the joint as an unhinged former garbage man who's now in charge of collecting the infected while Apa and Carson provide the rather bland love story. Nico and Sara's plight is supposed to be an inspiring one. So much so that other characters drop everything, and put themselves at risk, for the sake of "love." This never fully resonates though. Songbird is too much of a trudge for us to care about these two characters, amongst the rubble and ruin, and it causes everything else to collapse on itself. Plus, all the side stories, which play out in a quasi-Short Cuts manner, feel banal as well. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-best-sci-fi-movies-on-netflix&captions=true"]

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