Saturday, 1 October 2016

The Girl with All the Talents certificate 15 Bolden Cineworld


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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