I know little about American history, and far, far less about cars, but I'm sure that when Henry Ford made the Model T, it was a busted piece of garbage. Look at this fucking thing. Did you know that a car could look like it was terminally celebrating its 21st birthday? Another one. Strapped a blast furnace on an Oregon Trail buggy and called it a day. Riding a Model T to the top hat store must've been the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigs.
Again, don't know much about American history. (In high school, I cheated off two guys, Frank and Gage, mashing their answers together—called them Frage—so the teacher wouldn't catch on.) But Songbird, the Michael Bay-produced thriller, which imagines a world where COVID-19 has mutated four times over four years (COVID-23!), must be the Model T of pandemic movies. Drunk off its ass, a health hazard to even look at, physically painful to sit in for over 15 minutes, but hey, the first one in a future full of 'em.
This is the point where I tell you what Songbird is about. Before any of it will make sense, though, unfortunately, you need to know the rules 0f Songbird's mutated-on-mutated-on-mutated COVID world. It's where we fully enter pandemic fan-fiction territory. First up: The virus is so bad that you can't really leave your home. Outdoors might as well be indoors. Unless you're a munie (🧐), meaning you're immune to the virus and you wear a special band that says so. You have to take a selfie every morning, which will, somehow, tell you if you're sick or not. If you fail? Well, fuck, the Sanitation Department (Songbird's villainous organization, of course) will pick your ass up and drop you in the Q Zone, which looks like District 9 for coronavirus patients. As we hear in the mandatory, opening-credits voiceover of news bites, "It's the end of the world, bro!"
OK. The story. Goth Archie plays Nico, a munie courier who's trying to score some of those bands to put on his girlfriend and her grandmother. Songbird's powder keg is the grandma delivering a cough that will be studied at Juilliard someday. So, Nico really needs those bands, which throws him into the shady world of underground counterfeit band-making.He meets all kinds of fun people. Especially the evil head of the Sanitation Department, who, shit you not, explains that he went from garbage truck driver to Big Boss because everyone ahead of him died. There's also a fun little side plot featuring Alexandra Daddario as a sort of songstress-camgirl who gives Bradley Whitford lapdances but also flirts with Paul Walter Hauser playing an Afghanistan vet who owns a murderous drone named MAX. Songbird! If you had any doubt, having our lives documented, fictionalized, and beamed back at us is decidedly not fun to watch. On a cringe scale of one to The News, Songbird is Donald Trump dancing to "YMCA."
But hey. That didn't stop Songbird from showing us all kinds of pandemic-times wonders. You ever see someone try to run in a hazmat suit? All-out sprint. The gait matches, precisely, with Gritty's. It's ugly, yet strangely beautiful. Also included in this COVID Happy Meal: Two lovers, on either side of a closed door, whispering, "I can feel you... through this door!" The ratty-looking Perry Mason gangster in a sub-30-second cameo, playing an escaped Q-Zoner like he's Tyrone Biggums. Plus, the most fucked-up lapdance you'll see outside of Grand Theft Auto: Daddario's songstress-camgirl, face shield and mask, dancing atop Whitford's most recent divorced-dad type, the guy trying to pull her mask down even though he has an immunocompromised daughter at home.
Listen: In the middle of a global health disaster that's claimed the lives of over 1.4 million people, we don't need a Purge-like thriller using this trauma as nightmare fuel. We've seen a few TV episodes lately, that try to make sense of our reality—in the name of comfort, understanding, connection. Songbird is not that. Yes, we witness the the deaths of loved ones, relationships formed through FaceTime, but any sensitivity you'll find Songbird is immediately squashed when Mr. Sanitation Villain reappears, dramatically snorts a big wad of mucus back up his nose, and screams that munies... ARE GODS!
Maybe (maybe!) but not really, you could hall-pass Songbird if it was trying to say something, anything at all. But the message depends on what part of the movie you're watching. Those opening-credits news bites feature an Alex Jones-type wailing about, leading you to think Songbird was gearing up for an anti-vaxxer-and-masker takedown. We don't really get that. There's some spoofing of Whitford's character milling about town, but he leans more sex addict than nose-peeping out mask guy. And, generally, Songbird gives a big, rubber-gloved thumb up to staying inside, but only because a goon in a hazmat suit will throw you in the Q Zone along with Perry Mason's rogues gallery. Songbird was the first film to resume production in Los Angeles during the pandemic and it shows. It seems less concerned about what to say about this moment in hell, and more worried about being the first pandemic movie.
Songbird may have one thing going for it. (It's just now occurred to me that this Art is called Songbird. Why? Is it because, at one point, Mr. Sanitation Villain belts unintelligible opera in a bathroom presumably infested with COVID-19, 20, 21, 22, and 23? Making him the titular songbird? Or is it the songstress-camgirl? That's probably it.) When Joaquin Phoenix, in 2023, wins the Oscar for Best Actor for Lockdown, where he plays a wealthy Los Angelan who quarantines in his bomb shelter in the early pandemic—but accidentally traps himself inside for the next 73 years, cuing his descent into madness—we will remember the trials and tribulations of Songbird. You coughed so the rest of us could hack.
