Bird Box Barcelona Review: Netflix's Bird-Brained Franchise Extension Falls Flat
2022's great streaming contraction, with effects still rippling outwards a year later, stemmed largely from Netflix's investors realizing the one area in which they had not managed to lap their traditional studio counterparts: franchising. For all their one-off successes critically and culturally, the streaming giant still struggled to make lightning strike the same spot twice. With their binging model, Netflix conditioned audiences to gorge on content rather than turning their engagement into a habit.
To turn this trend around, the streamer is now unleashing a series of world-building films from their starriest projects that, frankly, no one asked for. Remember "Bird Box," the film that broke through in a bleak holiday 2018 season for movies by riding a dubious social media challenge to viral fame? Or, rather, remember anything about it other than that it starred Sandra Bullock and involved some freaky crows without consulting Wikipedia? Netflix is counting on that faint recollection of a vaguely good time to get its subscribers to click on the tile for "Bird Box Barcelona," a brand extension that maintains little more than the apocalyptic avian threat from its predecessor.
A not-so-happy meal
A New Yorker profile of Netflix's television chief earlier this year granted astonishing access to see how the sausage gets made at the streamer. She summed up the company's ideal product in one effective metaphor: the gourmet cheeseburger, an offering "premium and commercial at the same time." But "Bird Box Barcelona" feels like a capitulation to the McDonald's model, something predictable for global consumers but with specifics tailored enough to local markets.
While the original film played on American individualism as a backdrop for its thrills, this Spanish-language spinoff uses the Catholic Church's institutional imprint on the nation to add additional gravitas to an otherwise B-movie premise. "Bird Box Barcelona" plays with the spiritual undercurrents that come naturally with a world teetering on the verge of rapture. One Catholic priest, as seen in flashbacks throughout the film, sees a divine miracle occurring through the collapse of society.
But the film's protagonist Sebastián (Mario Casas) sees things differently. He tries to navigate a world where making eye contact with the mysterious harbingers of doom triggers people to take their own life by seeing a light within people. Encouraged by his daughter to act as a good "shepherd" for the lost lambs among humanity, his quest for survival and salvation assumes a messianic glint.
Too bad the writer/director Pastor duo (aptly named) are a little too tipsy off the metaphorical communion wine to really consummate this connection. Its allegory is interesting but insufficient. "Bird Box Barcelona" has no idea what to do with its great redeemer beyond sticking him in the middle of a family reunification story that gives the characters an excuse for geographic mobility ... and very little else.
(Not so) good grief
Like so many would-be "topical" movies that so much as touch the horror genre, "Bird Box Barcelona" would have you know that it's actually about grief. But its exploration of that emotion is limp and surface-level as it tracks the ragtag group that assembles to traverse treacherous Spanish terrain so a young German girl can rejoin her mother. It's as if the journey is one to prove they can outhustle the apocalypse.
All the while, they try to make some sense of the evolving threat terrain. The closest they get comes from physicist Octavia ("Babylon" breakout Diego Calva) speculating the creatures are quantum beings that feed off people's memories to make their menace seem uniquely personal. So, a boggart from "Harry Potter," in other words.
Perhaps the biggest difference in the five years that have passed since the previous series entry is that the world has undergone its own collective trauma through a pandemic. Not unlike the lagging enthusiasm for 2021's "A Quiet Place Part II," even a vividly realized cinematic fantasy cannot compare with the lived nightmare of COVID-19. The novelty is gone.
Like many of Netflix's recent releases, the worst sin of "Bird Box Barcelona" isn't that it's bad. It's that it's boring. Attempts to pile on appeals to various markets or satisfy core constituencies clutter a film that has its fair share of decent moments, such as a high-octane escape sequence set on a bus. Writer/directors Álex and David Pastor bring some ideas on how to enrich the mythology of the world, yet their corporate overlords never give those elements the space to succeed.
Cinema has always been as much commerce as content, but these transparent ploys for sequelization and world-building scan as transparent for even a casual viewer. Nothing takes flight here. "Bird Box Barcelona" might be the first of its kind, but it certainly will not be the last Netflix sequel or spinoff whose primary audience is a boardroom rather than a living room.
/Film rating: 4 out of 10