Have you ever watched a lobotomized movie? You know, one that started out really smart and then suddenly became really dumb for no apparent reason? The Kovak Box is that sort of film.
It begins by focusing on two different people. David Norton (Timothy Hutton) is a famous science fiction author taking his girlfriend to Spain for a speaking appearance. On the plane with them is Sylvia (Lucia Jimenez), a young Spanish woman returning home from the United States. Initially, their lives don't appear to have anything to do with one another. While David is asking his girlfriend to marry him, Sylvia goes out dancing and hooks up with the club DJ. But then David's girlfriend commits suicide for no reason and Sylvia tries to do the same by jumping out of her apartment window after hearing a song on her cell phone. Sylvia wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened and can't imagine why she would have tried to kill herself. David also can't imagine why his girlfriend took her own life, but the reason for both incidents is the same and leads David and Sylvia into strangely sedated conflict with Frank Kovak and his horrific experiments in mind control.
This movie starts out very strong and by the time Sylvia's naked body plunges from her apartment window, I had no idea what was going on and was really interested in finding out. Unfortunately, within 15 minutes I had completely figured out what was going on and spent the next hour and a half watching the film degenerate into a confused, poorly written, generic thriller.
The confusion comes when the film changes its mind as to what it's supposed to be about. The story introduces us to something called a Kovak Box. It's a device where lab rats go through a maze and have their behavior modified through positive and negative stimulus. It's obvious that the genesis of this movie was the idea of taking a person's life and transforming it into a real Kovak Box where the person would be manipulated into behaving a certain way and the goal would be to overcome that manipulation. So, that's how the story is set up but that's not how it unfolds. That's because at some point the filmmakers became more interested in the story as a metaphor for the creative impulse and the writing process where Frank Kovak wants David to write Kovak's life story. Imagine a sports movie that starts out being about a football team needing to win the big game, but then changes to be about the lead quarterback's efforts to learn to play the violin.
The Kovak Box has the same glaring flaw of just about every poorly written film as well. There are multiple times through the story where characters have to stop and say out loud what the movie is about and dump a bunch of information on the audience so the story can move forward. The whole point of a moving picture is to show and not tell, but The Kovak Box repeatedly has both David and Kovak bluntly run down the story so far and where it needs to go now, without which the movie couldn't inch from scene to scene. There are also times when the writer of the movie clearly doesn't understand what he's writing about, such as when he confuses the difference between having a vivid imagination and having perfect recall.
There's also clichés a plenty, from "the race against time" to "no one believes the main characters when they explain the threat" to "the villain explains his plans", which actually happens three different times. And after starting out with Sylvia being an equal character to David, she quickly becomes nothing more than a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued.
The Kovak Box is one of those movies where if you're not paying attention, you might be fooled into thinking it's much better than what it is, another interesting idea pressed into the same cookie cutter format used so many times before.
It begins by focusing on two different people. David Norton (Timothy Hutton) is a famous science fiction author taking his girlfriend to Spain for a speaking appearance. On the plane with them is Sylvia (Lucia Jimenez), a young Spanish woman returning home from the United States. Initially, their lives don't appear to have anything to do with one another. While David is asking his girlfriend to marry him, Sylvia goes out dancing and hooks up with the club DJ. But then David's girlfriend commits suicide for no reason and Sylvia tries to do the same by jumping out of her apartment window after hearing a song on her cell phone. Sylvia wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened and can't imagine why she would have tried to kill herself. David also can't imagine why his girlfriend took her own life, but the reason for both incidents is the same and leads David and Sylvia into strangely sedated conflict with Frank Kovak and his horrific experiments in mind control.
This movie starts out very strong and by the time Sylvia's naked body plunges from her apartment window, I had no idea what was going on and was really interested in finding out. Unfortunately, within 15 minutes I had completely figured out what was going on and spent the next hour and a half watching the film degenerate into a confused, poorly written, generic thriller.
The confusion comes when the film changes its mind as to what it's supposed to be about. The story introduces us to something called a Kovak Box. It's a device where lab rats go through a maze and have their behavior modified through positive and negative stimulus. It's obvious that the genesis of this movie was the idea of taking a person's life and transforming it into a real Kovak Box where the person would be manipulated into behaving a certain way and the goal would be to overcome that manipulation. So, that's how the story is set up but that's not how it unfolds. That's because at some point the filmmakers became more interested in the story as a metaphor for the creative impulse and the writing process where Frank Kovak wants David to write Kovak's life story. Imagine a sports movie that starts out being about a football team needing to win the big game, but then changes to be about the lead quarterback's efforts to learn to play the violin.
The Kovak Box has the same glaring flaw of just about every poorly written film as well. There are multiple times through the story where characters have to stop and say out loud what the movie is about and dump a bunch of information on the audience so the story can move forward. The whole point of a moving picture is to show and not tell, but The Kovak Box repeatedly has both David and Kovak bluntly run down the story so far and where it needs to go now, without which the movie couldn't inch from scene to scene. There are also times when the writer of the movie clearly doesn't understand what he's writing about, such as when he confuses the difference between having a vivid imagination and having perfect recall.
There's also clichés a plenty, from "the race against time" to "no one believes the main characters when they explain the threat" to "the villain explains his plans", which actually happens three different times. And after starting out with Sylvia being an equal character to David, she quickly becomes nothing more than a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued.
The Kovak Box is one of those movies where if you're not paying attention, you might be fooled into thinking it's much better than what it is, another interesting idea pressed into the same cookie cutter format used so many times before.