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a watchable zombie movie
Monday, May 15 2017
A little after 3:00pm, Gretchen drove off to the train station. Among other things, she'd be attending Miss Saigon with a newish friend who had free tickets. [REDACTED]
This little guy showed up with great fanfare today on the rail of the laboratory deck. He wasn't too scared of me, but he didn't stand still long enough to get a good photograph. His relative tameness suggested unfamiliarity with humans, suggesting he must be a creature of the deep forest. I eventually identified him as a redstart, a kind of warbler.
Earlier today during our daily video meeting, my remote-workplace colleague Ca had mentioned a movie he'd seen over the weekend entitled The Girl With All the Gifts. It sounded like a smarter take on the zombie genre, so I immediately downloaded it and got around to watching it late tonight after drinking a fair amount and also smoking a non-trivial amount of marijuana. I should mention beforehand that I don't like zombie movies or television shows, not even those of television's ongoing golden age. Whatever science is produced to explain the zombies is always embarrassing, and across all these productions, there's a predictable sameness to the reanimated semi-decomposed corpses staggering around trying (for some unknown reason) to get to and eat human flesh and the plucky band of normal humans trying to survive. Unless it's pitched as a knowing comedy (Sean of the Dead), I probably won't bother watching. But The Girl With All the Gifts came with a lot of complexity, revealing things through a series of initially-unexplained scenes and jarring, deeply-creepy juxtapositions. In the world of this movie, the scientific explanation for the zombies (and, unfortunately, these zombies are of the conventional sort) is an fungal infection that quickly takes over the human brain to make the human host into a mindless flesh-craving eating machine (similar to an actual fungus that performs mind control in ants). In keeping with zombie movie conventions, the fungus is spread through close contact resulting in injuries. But that's only part of the story. The zombifying fungus has different effects on different humans, and there are some (particularly those who gestated inside an infected mother) who retain most of their human qualities most of the time, turning into zombies only when in close proximity to a potential meal (which, partially for plot reasons, must always be someone or something that is not infected). Because of this one tweak to the zombie formula, all sorts of interesting social dynamics open up. Now it's possible for some zombies to interact as humans with non-zombies. They can even form alliances. This parallels an actual phenomenon that happens with diseases and hosts, which usually, over time, come to an understanding with one another and can even work things out to become mutually-beneficial.
Part of what made The Girl With All the Gifts so great was the music, which featured electronically-altered human voices that sound like theremins boiling up like fever around certain scenes, particularly during the onset of the sleepiness that seems to follow a flesh meal.
The panoramic shots of ruined, overgrown cities is also a reward in itself, though occasionally these looked more like paintings than actual spaces.
That all being said, The Girl With All the Gifts definitely had its weaknesses, chiefly in the form of Glenn Close, who, as Ca conceded, is a walking exposition machine. She gets the worst lines in the movie, including "If they [the fungal sporangia] were to open, the end of the world, probably." Her role was so terrible I didn't even recognize her as Glenn Close.
There are clearly influences from all the zombie, apocalypse, and horror movies from the past (I kept being reminded of Aliens), but the refreshing social/biological complexity really is an innovation, and it makes The Girl With All the Gifts a great movie.
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