Mark Reviews Movies: SONGBIRD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 10, 2020

Every time a fictional movie based on or inspired by or loosely connected to a real-world disaster or tragedy is released, there's always one big question on people's minds: Is it too soon? The makers of Songbird—a movie about the possible world of 2024, in which COVID-19 has evolved into the even more contagious and deadly COVID-23—have kind of sneakily bypassed that question.

We can't ask if this movie has been made and released too soon, because we're still in the middle of a global disaster and tragedy. Pretty much any analogy one could make about the timing of this movie would be in bad taste, and that's something the filmmakers probably should have considered as soon as the thought of this story came into their heads.

The good/bad thing is that it seems pretty obvious screenwriters Adam Mason (who also directed) and Simon Boyes didn't have too many thoughts going through their heads while putting this story together. The world remains a mess, as 8,000,000 people have died in the story's current year. At least in Los Angeles, everyone is now in a forcible lockdown scenario, maintained by the city's Department of Sanitation. That's not like letting garbage collectors oversee the implementation of containing a deadly disease, but only because it's exactly that.

Only a tenth of a percentage of the world's population is immune to the virus (Someone needs to work out the odds that one of these characters, who's revealed to immune by the end, would somehow end up dating another person who's immune). Only they are allowed to go outside, because the virus is now completely airborne. The slang term for these fortunate folks is "munies," and that's about all the creativity Mason and Boyes have expended for such terminology. The armed guards who make sure an infected person stays in place before they're transported to some kind of quarantine zone are just called "armed guards." Those quarantine zones are called, well, "quarantine zones."

The story isn't particularly unique. It features a group of somewhat interconnected people as they go about their lives in the city, and the plot eventually builds to a series of chases, fights, and shootouts, as our hero delivery guy Nico (K.J. Apa) attempts to get his girlfriend Sara (Sofia Carson) out of the city. If that sounds terribly irresponsible—both for her and for anyone who might come into contact with Sara, especially after her grandmother contracts the virus—under the circumstances, congratulations on having a better understanding, in less than a year into this pandemic, of infectious diseases and basic prevention measures than our heroes, who have been living with it for multiple years.

There's a subplot about a bitterly married couple (played by Bradley Whitford and Demi Moore) who make fake "immunity bracelets," which let the authorities now that a person is free-ish to travel around the city. There's yet another about the man in that relationship forcing himself upon a singer (played by Alexandra Daddario), who arrived in town under the guy's false promise of a recording contract just, as bad luck would have it, before the pandemic began. Craig Robinson plays Nico's boss, who keeps track of his employees with GPS, and Paul Walter Hauser plays a wounded veteran who's a fan of the singer and plans a rescue operation.

To call the movie exploitative is pointless, as it is on its face. To call it unimaginative would also be pretty redundant, considering how formulaic and predictable the plot eventually becomes. The central question is whether to look at this movie as wrong-headed or overtly sinister in its irresponsibility.

In case it isn't clear yet, the villains here are the Sanitation Department, which has implemented a strategy that comes straight from a conspiracy theorist's wet dream and is run by a sociopathic killer played by Peter Stormare. Is this the correct message to be spreading right now, when the actual virus portrayed in the movie continues to spread freely in some places, because people actually believe nonsense like the movie presents? We can excuse the movie, clearly made in a rush to still be relevant (That's a pretty cynical goal, by the way), for the obvious lack of thought put into its characters and plot.

Can and, more importantly, should we excuse it, though, for being so thoughtless in the point it's trying to make? Songbird at least has a good defense: It's dumb enough that we can't assume some malicious intent in its existence.

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