I just watched it. Amazing. I think people have really underestimated this film. It's a brilliant prosecution of the modern psyche. People are too self involved. We don't understand nature at all. The cardboard cutout CGI birds are a representation of man's ignorance of nature. The hippie Global Warming message-thumpers represent the way the average person looks at any sort of environmentalist.
Face it, as soon as anyone hears the words "Global Warming" they groan and roll their eyes as though it's gone out of fashion or something. Climate change was so 2003.
So you've got these shallow, mindless drones going about their daily grind, never really thinking too much about their environment or the planet. The 'protagonist' guy watches as the news talks about the death of polar bears, wildfires, mass bird deaths, etc and he's just sitting there eating a donut like it's no big deal. He may drive a hybrid, and he may buy some solar panels, but is he doing that because he gives a shit about the environment or because he's an upper middle-class douchebag following a trend? His lack of interest in anything outside his job and supermodel girlfriend tells me he's just following the herd.
They spend the first half of the movie just existing. We endure the monotony with them. Driving to work. Driving home. Walking to the car. Sitting in a meeting. Sitting at a cubicle. Having boring, shallow conversations. We even hear the same short musical cues over and over. Repetition and boredom. They see some dead birds on the beach and have no idea what to do. The birds look fake to us, but they may as well be aliens to them. They react as though the birds could explode at any second. Later they see some birds hovering on a tree. They again have an alien look to them, as though the characters have no clue as to what they're looking at. They have no appreciation for nature, and give these birds very puzzled looks.
When the birds finally do attack, they're destroying towns and gas stations. They're exploding and dive-bombing buildings. If you take this footage as being as exaggerated as the banality of the first half of the film, and as exaggerated as the way they view the message-thumping environmentalist characters, the scenes with the birds could very well just be their interpretation of some much simpler events, including perhaps some fantasies about how they're reacting to these events. Gunning down birds with an AK47? Seems like more of an overly-heroic fantasy formed in the mind of a guy who watches too much TV and movies. Perhaps there are some birds with some sort of disease, as the environmentalist is saying, and that these birds are indeed attacking people, but surely the explosions are things that they are fantasizing.
For example, the birds are exploding in the first shots, but then fail to do so again throughout the rest of the film. The characters don't see these events, so perhaps we are to interpret this as how the mass media might cover these events? Also, at a gas station scene, the pump only catches fire after they leave, meaning that the characters themselves could very well have been fantasizing that. I think this film may be a representation of the sort of mass hysteria the media can cause with their 'gotcha' style of reporting - their exaggerations and lies to make any mundane story seem like it could be the end of the world.
I give it 3/4 stars. I believe Armond White would agree.
