Burying Buried

I never got a chance to see this one in theaters, but finally caught it on Netflix.  And I have to say: I was gravely disappointed (especially after all the critical praise the film received).  The premise (a civilian contractor regains consciousness, and finds himself buried in a wooden coffin in the Iraqi desert) is a strong one, yet the decision to start the movie from that precise moment (and to stay in the coffin for the duration) inhabits the audience's
understanding of Ryan Reynolds's character.  Also, I found some of the drama a bit contrived, such as when Reynolds awakens and discovers that a giant snake (which allegedly entered through a crack in the coffin) is sliding out of the leg of his pants (wouldn't the snake have disturbed him on the way into his clothing? How did it turn around in there if it first entered at the cuff?).  The ostensible twist ending, moreover, falls flat--the fact that (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!) Reynolds dies within the coffin makes the movie seem like much ado about nothing.  The plot here could be reduced to: man stuck in coffin; struggles, but never gets out.  In their failure to liberate the protagonist at the last minute, the filmmakers missed an excellent opportunity to have the audience experience some Shawshank-type catharsis.

Perhaps the movie's greatest shortcoming, though, is that (for me, at least) it never instills a feeling of claustrophobic dread.  There's some effective use of a blackened screen here, but paradoxically, bringing the camera inside the lighter-illumined coffin with Reynolds actually makes the confines seem larger.  I suspect that this sort of story ultimately works much better in print than on film.  It's the kind of predicament tale, for example, that Stephen King excels at (cf. "A Very Tight Place").  And who can forget the all-time master of the narrative of hasty internment, Edgar Allan Poe:

It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death.  The unendurable oppression of the lungs--the stifling fumes of the damp earth--the clinging to the death garments--the rigid embrace of the narrow house--the blackness of the absolute Night--the silence like a sea that overwhelms--the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm--these things, with the thoughts of the air and grass above, with the memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed--that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead, these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil.  We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth--we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.  ("The Premature Burial")

Now that's how you impart a sense of awful claustrophobia!