Virus-crossed lovers
New movie Songbird is a pandemic spin on Shakespeare's classic Romeo and Juliet
Five or six lifetimes ago (i.e., back in May) it was announced that Hollywood heavy-hitter Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor, Transformers) was producing the first action movie set during the pandemic.
Actually, given that filming took place within said pandemic, and was briefly halted by the Screen Actors Guild, Bay's declaration sounded more like a threat than a promise.
But however you characterize it, he has delivered. First out of the gate, Songbird is the Pfizer vaccine of pandemic thrillers. I just wish I could report that it's 95-per-cent effective. I'm guessing Rottentomatoes will eventually weigh in with 20 per cent or so.
Like a lot of near-future sci-fi, Songbird relies on rough-and-ready special effects — lots of concrete barricades, empty streets and yellow caution tape — and a whack of newly minted slang. The disease of 2024 is called COVID-23. (I guess viruses always lag behind the calendar that way.) Quarantine camps are Q-zones. Anyone immune to the virus is a “muni.”
Then there's “Nico.” That future talk for a blandly handsome hero, this one played by Riverdale's K.J. Apa. He's a bicycle courier working for Lester (Craig Robinson), and making regular deliveries to a pair of shady entrepreneurs played by Demi Moore and Bradley Whitford. He's also in love with Sara (Sofia Carson), equally bland and living in lockdown with her sweet grandmother.
Director Adam Mason has described this movie as a kind of Romeo and Juliet tale, with lockdown keeping the lovers apart. In which case why not call it Two Gentlemen of Corona? Songbird sounds like they just went with the working title and forgot to change it to something punchier.
But the tone-deaf production reminded me of Remember Me, a Robert Pattinson romance that annoyed critics by ending with his character on the top floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. And that came out in 2010! Imagine if it had been shot while the towers were still a pile of debris.
The sprawling cast includes Alexandra Daddario as a singer caught up in an ugly affair with Whitford's character; Paul Walter Hauser as Dozer, an Afghanistan vet who's been in his own personal lockdown since well before the pandemic; and Peter Stormare as the villainous head of the local “sanitation department,” tasked with rounding up the sick and shipping them to the barbarous Q-zones.
With its weird leaps in logic, including the notion that California's Big Sur region is somehow COVID-FREE (it isn't), Songbird will sit nicely with fringier moviegoers who want more proof that their government is using the pandemic to strip away every civil liberty. But there is one sweet connection with the real world.
At 90 minutes, it's over quickly, the way one hopes all things pandemic-related — the second wave, vaccine rollout, etc. — will be.