I have to whisper to you a secret. I am totally done with zombies and dystopian futures. Besides superheroes, this decade has been the decade of zombie outbreaks and YA dystopias in which adults are meanyheads to teenagers. Now, when the wave of these cultural phenomena is coming down, in the late-twilight stage of these hypes, I am watching The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s based on a popular book published in 2014 during the Hunger Games craze and almost immediately got opted for a movie translation, which arrived only two years later in 2016.
Of course it was opted for a movie right away, because it is a most successful marriage between the two genres. We start out with a girl who is “special”, “different”, like in the Divergent series. How so, this is where the zombie apocalypse comes in. Melanie lives in some kind of underground bunker where soldiers strap her down and keep her at gunpoint (very mean adults), while she just lives her life and is taught by Miss Justineau, a compassionate teacher. Very soon, we discover that Melanie is actually a rehabilitated zombie who learned to have a self again. She might hold the key to making an antidote to the zombie plague.
Soon, everything goes pear-shaped and Melanie, together with Miss Justineau, a soldier and a doctor find themselves on the run in zombie-invested England. They keep Melanie cuffed, except at times when she is of use because the zombies do not mind her. Melanie is played by Sennia Nanua in way where I can’t decide whether her acting wasn’t particularly strong, or whether Melanie as a character was just supposed to be a bit off. She is excessively polite to all the soldiers and teachers, greeting everyone by their name and title. I’m not sure why; maybe it is meant to show that she is kind and smart.
The rest of the movie is mostly about their travels towards London. There are a couple more scenes revolving around kids, but this movie taught me that children acting as hungry zombies looks very fake, unless the cameras and editing do lots of work to make it real. In this film, however, the zombies made me giggle rather than tense up. They are just so clearly actors that I feel secondhand embarrassment to see them snarling and ogling.
The film is quite alright though. I’m being quite negative because the story feels like it is designed in a laboratory for maximum bandwagon success, but the story actually has some great twists and turns, especially at the beginning. It unfolds in a very intelligent way that keeps your interests. Visually, it is quite strong too. It has many good sets and the action is filmed very well, with great use of putting action in the foreground and background. There are some great panning shots during the action where people run from zombies and escape in the nick of time.
The story grows in scope as we move along, hinting at earlier classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. There is vision behind the film and overall it is worth a view. I even suspect that the hype surrounding zombie movies actually hurt this film, because (and I am guilty of this as well) it is now put into a box with many similar films so that we can say “oh these are all the same”. But The Girl With All the Gifts is an honest attempt at making something nice and is very aware of the history of the genres that it is part of.
7/10
Advertisements Share this:
