Be warned, the next time you see "Richard Kelly" involved in any production, run away. Fast.<br /><br />Kelly proved to the world after his last movie, "Southland Tales", that he is one pretentious director. It was indulgent and convoluted. In "The Box", not much has changed.<br /><br />I can picture what his pitch to Warner Bros must have been, and I bet the executives at the studio ate it right up: a full-feature film based on one of Richard "Twilight Zone" Matheson's old short stories.<br /><br />Big mistake! Do not read any further unless you want this movie COMPLETELY spoiled for you: <br /><br />Norma (Cameron Diaz) pushes the button. <br /><br />Turns out that Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) has an Alien using his body as a vessel to conduct "experiments" in which the fate of mankind rests. His face is scarred because he was struck by Alien lightening, which killed him, but then brought him back to life to do all of this red button testing. Obviously since Norma pushes the button, knowing full well that someone may die, she must suffer the consequences for failing to consider someone else's life instead of her own. In the end she and her husband (James Marsden) choose to kill Norma instead of having their son grow up deaf and blind.<br /><br />Kelly dances around his film's "message", trying to make the audience figure out what the moral of the story is. Obviously, any person with a brain is saying at the beginning, "What if I was the person who dies?". Richard Kelly doesn't even let his character's have this normal, HUMAN conversation. In fact, they avoid it all together. They appear to both be educated, working at a prestigious school and also for NASA, so why wouldn't they both have a better ability to LOOK OUTSIDE OF THE BOX???<br /><br />If he had the main characters actually have this conversation, the entire movie could have ended right there! Instead, we have to watch weddings go on forever, NASA and the NSA be complacent to Arlington Stewart taking over these government programs, teleportation to show Marsden life beyond our world so it will be "easier" to kill his wife, and drone's controlled by Steward which can be anywhere and nowhere, at any time.<br /><br />The most painful part of this movie is the pacing. Nothing really happens. Its a muddled mish-mash of ideas that are laughable.<br /><br />It is insufferable how this film is being marketed. The commercials make it look like "Saw" and even use the music from those films to sell it. In reality what you get is a slow, dull, laughable (yes, half the theater was laughing at the acting and visual effects), and messy film which is neither imaginative, interesting, nor cohesive. At one point, Cameron Diaz and her son are abducted and then suddenly, she is back in the NSA's big black car with her husband on the way home. Where did she go? Why did they take her? Do we really care? Not anymore you won't.<br /><br />By the end you really won't care what happens to any of the characters. You will be rooting for all of them to die so the film will just end. Go see anything else that's playing. Don't waste your time, or money.