Of course, that’s just one chunk of this mess, and it's when the story keeps going that we’re given the whole trough. Of all the potential stories to tell about what living through this year has been like for many, it defies logic that this final project – one that caters only to the most agitated and upset by how they have to wear a mask to the grocery store – was the one that was given the green light. While viral outbreak movies are a staple of horror/sci-fi/thrillers, Mason and Boyes shamelessly decided to take advantage of current, real fears and anxieties by illustrating an uncontrolled pandemic where the villains are the government and health officials – here in the form of the Department of Sanitation, led by an especially surly Peter Stormare – who want to keep you locked in your homes and take you away should you get sick. If that sounds like the writers decided to take the alarmist approach to pandemic filmmaking, that’s because they are. Instead of opening on the genre-standard news feeds acting as a sort of montage for the spiral of the virus, Songbird instead goes the internet troll route and focuses early minutes on conspiracy videos filled with talking heads going off about the virus and the folly of the government, who here are rounding up sick people and forcing them into quarantine camps.
Conceived by director/co-written Adam Mason and co-writer Simon Boyes during the early period of this year’s ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, Songbird takes place four years after the outbreak of COVID-23, mutating into something uncontrollable and requiring government agencies to stick infected people in “Q-zones”, leaving the streets of LA empty and destitute, with our main characters seemingly the only ones left around.
SONGBIRD REVIEW MOVIE
It would be forgivable if Songbird were at least a well-made, if still misguided, pandemic thriller, but what makes the movie such an excruciating experience to watch is how its blatantly irresponsible premise is matched by its inept construction. Here we are, in the midst of a global pandemic that has left over a million (and counting) dead, and along comes this movie that proves that at some point the people involved thought it would be a good idea to crudely romanticize this very real and scary scenario – not to mention pander to conspiracy theorists who likely view it all as a hoax – with an ugly, ludicrous thriller that offers nothing more than a horrible example of what it looks like when people with money try to kill some time during a quarantine.
REVIEW: Songbird – produced by Michael Bay and starring a cast made up of actors who are all far too good for this material – is the worst example of art imitating life in recent memory. PLOT: In the year 2024, the COVID-23 virus has mutated beyond control, and in the midst of the chaos a young man tries to save his girlfriend from evil health officials who are coming to take her and her sick grandmother away.
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