#CAST OF SONGBIRD 2020 MOVIE#

HBO Max’s Locked Down led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor has received only modest reviews. Other projects both shot and set in the pandemic are hardly streaming success stories.

#CAST OF SONGBIRD 2020 MOVIE#

With daily symptom checks just to enter buildings at Penn, empty streets, and vaccine gatekeeping-isn’t this world already dystopian enough? The last thing we want is a movie essentially telling us, “It could be worse.”Īnd it’s not just Songbird that’s failing to deliver with its pandemic production other big–budget pandemic content is falling just as flat. We still don’t know if the vaccine will be effective against new COVID–19 mutations, if our economy will bounce back, or if our healthcare system will endure. When so much is still uncertain, it’s too soon to create some fictional narrative of a near future pseudo–apocalypse when real–world grief and trauma still feel world–shattering. For a film with so much hype, the final product is particularly disappointing. Sure, bad movies are released all the time. Is the ambiguity a form of commentary on the uncertainty of our present world? Maybe, but that sentiment is too shrouded in bad dialogue and confusing plot points to be palpable. Though there are vague allusions to political corruption, rampant mutation, and societal apathy, the audience is left to guess how the situation came to be. This, perhaps, is the most anxiety–inducing thing about the film: It never actually explains the context of the diseased dystopia it attempts to depict. Songbird’s world has descended into a sanitation department–ruled martial law that’s far from our present reality-though the movie makes no attempt to give any further detail about how exactly things became so severe and corrupt. Songbird is a wannabe pandemic thriller in the likeness of The Happening, 28 Days Later, and Contagion the result is a rushed and sickeningly predictable attempt at COVID–19 commentary.

Capitalizing on quarantine anxiety, the notoriety of its cast, and the boastful intrigue of being the first feature–length film to shoot in Los Angeles amid the pandemic, Songbird is at its best gimmicky and at its worst deeply exploitative of the trauma of COVID–19.

While the trailer showed promise upon its October release, Songbird itself was wholly disappointing: The character development is sparse, the plot thin, and the premise stale and clichéd. If you fail, you’re forced into the dreaded “Q–Zone,'' which is practically a death sentence. Temperature checks are required every morning. All except the immune are confined to their homes. Songbird takes us into a botched near–future fiction where COVID–19 has mutated into the more contagious and much deadlier COVID–23.

Cast of songbird 2020