Songbird (STX Films, Invisible Narratives, Platinum Dunes, Universal, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched an interesting movie called Songbird, which a friend of mine had recommended as the first film that has definitively riffed off the current SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic. The film is dated 2020 and was directed by Adam Mason from a script by him and Steven Boyes, though the name prominently featured on the cover of the Blu-Ray box is Michael Bay, director of such spectacular cinematic apocalypses as The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Island and the Transformers movies. Mason and Boyes made one big mistake in their script that predictably annoyed me – not only because before I started writing about the pandemic I made sure to get the nomenclature right by looking it up on the Centers for Disease Control Web site but because we’d just watched Lesley Stahl get it right on a 60 Minutes episode alleging that the Chinese government is covering up the true origins of the pandemic and has done so since the first cases emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019. The correct name for the virus is SARS-CoV-2 – an evolution of the original SARS-CoV virus discovered (also in China) in 2003 – and COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes. The Mason/Boyes script posits that by 2024 (the date the film takes place, though that’s from the promotional materials and isn’t all that apparent in the film itself) the disease has mutated into a far more virulent and easily transmissible form called “COVID-23” – if the virus did indeed evolve it would more properly be called SARS-CoV-3 (or -4 or -5 if it underwent even more far-reaching changes).

Aside from that, Songbird is a surprisingly short (just 84 minutes of running time) and obviously quickly thrown-together story that’s entertaining enough on its own merits but draws on virtually every science-fiction dystopia made at least since Blade Runner in 1982, with special borrowings from previous pandemic movies like Carriers and Contagion. (I’ve never seen Contagion – though it apparently had a surge in digital rentals and DVD sales when SARS-CoV-2 hit – but I did write about Carriers in 2016 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/10/carriers-paramount-vantage-likely-story.html and not surprisingly found it a deeper and richer film than Songbird.)

The central characters of Songbird are Nick (K. J. Apa, a boyishly handsome if rather sloppy-looking young man who reminded me of Marty Deeks, the character played by Eric Christian Olsen on NCIS: Los Angeles), a bike messenger by day and a motorcycle rider by night; Sara (Sofia Carson), his sort-of girlfriend – they are clearly interested in each other but because of the fearsome lockdown all Los Angeles has been put under they literally can’t see each other and can communicate only on either side of the tightly closed door to her apartment – and Lita (Elpidio Carritio), Sara’s roommate and also her grandmother (though we get the impression these are two separate people being played by the same actress). Nico (also sometimes called Nicholas or Nick) is ferrying packages around Los Angeles for a mysterious client named William Griffin (Bradley Whitford) and his wife Piper (Demi Moore, the only real star “name” in this cast), though he periodically stops at old basketball courts and other locations that make him nostalgic for the old days before the various pandemics, including the original COVID-19 as well as the current COVID-23. These stopovers earn him the ire of Lester (Craig Robinson), the heavy-set Black guy who owns the messenger service and keeps track of Nico through GPS.

At first the two plot lines – Nico’s activities as a bike messenger and William’s surreptitious business that involves the packages Nico delivers to him – don’t seem to have any necessary connection, but soon they get tied together: before the pandemic(s) Sara was an aspiring singer and William was a record-company executive who lured her to L.A. with the promise of rock stardom but really only wanted to fuck her. Then the original pandemic happened and basically shut down the music business, especially the parts of it involving live performance and any hope of launching Sara’s career, so she’s taken to performing online and singing to various people who log on to her channel. Some of her customers complain that she performs only her own songs and not familiar oldies, but let’s be fair: the cost of licensing well-known songs was probably beyond this movie’s budget. Sara is also making extra money as a prostitute and William is her primary client – he’s desperate for direct face-to-face contact and is willing to pay for it, though when she starts putting him off he decides to attack her and tries to break into her car. It turns out that though the virus has evolved so it’s not only more easily transmissible but it kills its victims within just 48 hours of exposure (of course Edgar Allan Poe’s pandemic story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” cut it still further to half an hour!), certain people, including Nick, have developed immunity to all its various strains – though they’re insultingly called “munies” and are actually looked down on by the rest of the population because they can pass the virus to others even though they can’t get sick themselves.

Another gimmick in this movie is that the government organization that enforces the quarantines and ships infected people to the so-called “Q Zones,” essentially concentration camps intended to isolate the victims so they croak without infecting anyone else, is called the “Department of Sanitation,” and in a chilling speech a man named Dozer (Paul Walter Hauser) recalls how he rose from a truck driver for the original Los Angeles Department of Sanitation back when it still did what it does now – dispose of people’s garbage – to head the entire department when his superiors all died, and now he glories in his terrifying job of breaking into the homes of people with the disease and carting them off to the terrifying “Q Zones.” There’s also a man in a wheelchair who identifies himself as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and also as a “fag” (with his disability providing the excuse that, like most movie Gay men, he’s never shown having or even contemplating actually having sex with a man) who has his own drone and sends it out to protect Sara, who’s become a confidant of his via her musical Webcast, by taking out William Griffin just when he’s about to break into her car and rape her. Dozer breaks into Sara’s apartment to carry out the COVID-23 victims and insists on taking Sara along even though her viral tests have been consistently negative, and Nico races against time to get her a false “munie” bracelet from William’s stash (that was the racket he was involved in) so the two of them can flee the city and be together as a normal pre-pandemic couple.

In the climax, Dozer and an armed tactical squad from the Department of Sanitation is about to cart Sara off to the Q Zone when Nico proclaims that her tests have shown she is actually a “munie,” too. I was expecting the film to end tragically, with both Nico and Sara gunned down by the Department of Sanitation goon squad for resisting being taken to the Q Zone, but instead Nico absurdly easily persuades them that they’re both “munies” and they’re allowed to flee the city on Nico’s motorcycle for what’s obviously supposed to be a crowd-pleasing happy ending.

Songbird is reasonably entertaining but it’s the sort of movie you think you’ve seen before even if you haven’t; director Mason even borrows the famous sound effect from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 of a man in a spacesuit (or, as here, a haz-mat suit) hearing his own breathing unnaturally loudly. I suspect the first film made about a disaster shouldn’t be expected to be any good; I thought of Wake Island (1942), the first U.S. movie made about America’s involvement in World War II, and how it (like Songbird) was an assemblage of pre-existing clichés that had the further handicap of trying to create an inspiring, morale-boosting film at a time when the U.S. was actually getting its ass kicked in the real war. (Apparently the film worked well enough that some theatres had military recruiters stationed in their lobbies to encourage young men to sign up – and quite a few of them did.) It also reminded me of a film I’ve heard of but never seen, The Net – the first film ever made specifically about the Internet (i.e., the one that exists today, not the sort of computer network science-fiction writers might have dreamed about before) – in which Sandra Bullock plays a woman who’s cyber-stalked before cyber-stalking was that much of a real-world “thing.”

At times this film seemed to be trying for the pathos that made Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novella “Dark Benediction” (1951), still my favorite story in the pandemic-apocalypse genre, so moving – particularly the pathos of the two romantic leads growing more and more attracted to each other but unable to touch each other (in “Dark Benediction” the two are fleeing free-lance fascists aimed at stamping out the pandemic by exterminating the carriers, so they’re out in the open and able to consummate their relationship, but fearful of doing so since the disease is spread by touch and she has it but he doesn’t) – but for the most part Mason and Boyes are content just to make the most obvious points. One odd thing about this disc is it contains a large number of deleted scenes – and quite a few of them would have made the film stronger if they’d been included, including a scene explaining why Sara performs her Webcast a capella (she can’t use her guitar because a string broke and there’s no way to replace it) and more of the announcements from public loudspeakers that would have added to the Big Brother-ish quality of the film. It’s not clear at this stage just how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be depicted in the artworks of the future (one odd thing about the 1918-1919 flu is that virtually none of the artists who lived through it actually wrote about it; it’s mentioned in passing in John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – Dos Passos had actually been exposed to it when he shipped out to fight in World War I – but neither F. Scott Fitzgerald nor Ernest Hemingway mentioned it at all), but it’s quite likely they’ll do a better job than Adam Mason and Steve Boyes did. I still hope a filmmaker with the right talent and imagination would just put “Dark Benediction” on the screen already!