Zombie horror films do not usually
appeal so I had not planned to experience the Girl with all the Talents until
listening to the Kermode Mayo film review programme on Friday afternoon. I
attended the 6pm performance at the Cineworld Bolden on Thursday 29th
September 2016, shown in one of the smaller theatres but well supported, having
first visited the Morrison’s at South Shields for two pints of milk and a ready-made
seafood salad noting they had put the price back up against from £2 to £2.17.
As with the play the Season
Ticket and Cymbeline, this is a film about children with a certificate 15 and
which in my youth would have been 18 such is the debateable worldliness of
today’s young people in some respects, although I for one would rather children
and young people were made aware of the reality of the human world that be
brought up in the ignorance I experienced.
The Girl of the film in
question Melanie, played by Sennia Nanu, lives in a hash world where in the
presence of the hostile military security personnel who guard her chaining her
to chair for education and assessment purposes every day, locking her alone in a
bleak bare cell and significantly providing her with food that shocks, but which
is a clue of what is to come. She is but
one child of a number treated in this way.
In what can be described as
the first act we learn that she is different and the subject of monitoring and
detailed observations for the purpose of securing an antidote for the virus which
has decimated the population and where there are striking similarities with the
Pandemic, certificate 18 which I recently experience on Sky. I can without plot
spoiling too much reveal that the virus is passed by the transfer of human
fluid than airborne and that affected humans (other non-humans appears exempt)
develop a satiable hunger for flesh and which appears unrelated to the limited
available of processed food which becomes an issue for those not affected. Once
satiated the infected human goes into a trance like state until the sight,
sound and smell of the unaffected arouses into a crazed pursuit for food
survival, although the urge to feed also appears unrelated to the level of
hunger.
There are two lead female
characters in the film. The first, the teacher Helen played by Gemma Arterton
who symbolises the care of motherhood and who is responsible for protecting the
girl when in what can be described as Act two she, and the other woman with the
military security are forced to leave the research compound when it is overrun.
The other woman, Dr Caldwell (the outstanding actor in a female role Glenn
Close) is presented as the baddie whereas in reality as the ending proves, her
work is the difference between human survival as we know it and the development
of a new species. As the second act moves into the final third we learn how Melanie,
the other children at the experimentation centre in act one together the
children in the wild of what is left of London in Act two came to be a new kind
of human species inheriting both our innate human qualities and characteristics.
The decision of this small group to go in search of water, then food and then a
means of continuing the search for a cure leads then to a London in the process
of transition and learning that the human zombies encountered is the first part
of a progression with the potentially devastating outcome of the virus becoming
airborne and obliterating most of human kind with perhaps the exception of the
second generation which Melanie represents.
At the end of the film Melanie
is forced to make a choice of profound significance. On my own I am sometimes asked what I thought
of the film on leaving, I was on both occasions during the interval of the
Season Ticket. This occasion the stranger entered into a conversation while he
waited for his partner, and I presume female friend to toilet. What impressed
me is that he had got it, the wider implications of this film for the important
choices we face on global climate change, or weapons of mass civilian
extermination, but also on the dangers of exploring the universe and announcing
our existence to other beings together with the need for collective
international preparations for our defence and the potential continuation of
human life elsewhere.
The film has its gruesome
moments and aspects should shock rather than terrify or even frighten.
Because of my monthly subscription
I saw the film for free which as a senior saved me £7.90 which would have been
£8.80 for a later evening showing.
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