The Boy On The Bridge

The Gifted
Generation

The Boy On
The Bridge
by M. R. Carey
Orbit Publishing
ISBN: 9780356503561

Warning: Some very mild spoilers.

The Boy On The Bridge is M. R. Carey’s prequel novel to the original novel and film The Girl With All The Gifts (my review of the film is here and the book review is here), which he wrote simultaneously, giving slightly different versions of the same story to different media as he went along. Now, I absolutely loved both the movie and novel versions of that one but I have to say, I expected a prequel to a story which had a very definite and somewhat bleak ending... at least for the human survivors of the post-apocalyptic world depicted... to be somewhat labouring the point as it surely could have nothing new to say. But, actually, I was wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom in this prequel and, well, let me just say that the brief epilogue to the book, set 20 years after the events depicted in this novel, actually acts as an epilogue to the first novel as well... or as a sequel, actually.

So this story is about the crew of the fortified truck/land raider style military vehicle which went out in the world to find a cure but which disappeared long before the action in the first novel/film took place. The vehicle is called the Rosalind Frank, known more affectionately as Rosie, which houses a small team of scientists and military personnel, collecting biological samples from the hungries (the name for the zombies in Carey’s world) in order to try and find some kind of helpful cure or breakthrough against the highly contagious disease which has destroyed the majority of the population... the ‘still human population’... of the planet. You may or may not remember that the discarded carcass of the Rosie was found by a bunch of survivors in The Girl With All The Gifts and was made much use of, by them, for a while.

This is the story of one of the scientists, Greaves, a boy genius who has a kind of high level Aspergers or something similar, who is also the inventor of the blocker/inhibitor that we were introduced to in the first book/film that humans smear on to hide their scent from the hungries. He’s mostly hated, or at least looked on with much suspicion, by most of the others apart from one scientist, Dr. Khan, who kinda rescued him as a young boy. However, Khan is pregnant, as it turns out and really shouldn’t be on this mission in this state... especially after something happens around halfway through the book which puts both her fate and that of the baby’s in a much more questionable state, in terms of how they will be accepted by the rest of the crew.

This novel also builds on the idea of the Junkers (which were in the first novel but not in the movie version) and, very importantly, the tribe of half hungries/half human children who the ‘special’ pupil Melanie discovers in The Girl With All The Gifts... depicted here a few years before she meets up with them.

And, it’s a very entertaining and certainly gripping novel. Somewhat, it has to be said, because the author has followed a similar formula to the first one. A ‘special’ kid (in this case human) and an adult who sympathises and has a relationship of sorts with him. And then the world is seen through the eyes of Greaves for a lot of it but it’s also much more of an ensemble piece in terms of other characters also having a lot to say and do... Carey limits himself to around five or six characters with which we share the odyssey of the book.

And, yeah, this is a short review for sure but, mainly because it’s a brilliant novel and I had no complaints at all. I do want to say though that, if you’re familiar with the first one in either of its forms, then this tale isn’t just a case of filling in the gaps... it does advance things to the point where a kind of hope can be found out of the ashes of both what happens here and at the ending of the original tale. Also, without giving too much away, the epilogue of the book is where you will find out, definitively, what just became of Melanie and Miss Justineau from the first book. Things tie in a lot nicer than you might be expecting and... well, I’d love to read a third book at some point but, like the first story, I’d be hard pressed to figure out where the author could possibly go from here. But, yeah, he did pretty great with The Boy On The Bridge so, perhaps that’s not just wishful thinking on my part. So... a hugely entertaining and very suspenseful novel which more than lives up to the original. My one warning to potential readers, though, would be to read The Girl With All The Gifts before you start on this one... otherwise that epilogue is going to make no sense and will give away spoilers for the first novel (and film). So, yeah, give it a go.

The Girl With All The Gifts

From Bunkers
To Junkers

The Girl With
All The Gifts
by M. R. Carey
Orbit Books
ISBN: 9780356500157

This is a very short review to highlight the original novel The Girl With All The Gifts, by M. R. Carey. I hesitate to call it the source novel for the amazing movie of the same name, since Carey also wrote the screenplay to that iteration of it while simultaneously working on this novel. So the two parts... novel and movie... grew together as an organic whole, it seems to me. There are some slight differences to the both versions and, the novel certainly is more detailed in the way the story is told, obviously... but the film is very faithful to the novel, as one would expect with such a closely shared conception of ideas.

The Girl With All The Gifts deals with a post apocalyptic Earth where zombies... known to the protagonists in the book as ‘hungries’... and focuses on a group who study/educate/experiment with a group of child hungries who are, to quote a popular childrens song... not like the others. At some point, the cruel and clinical world in which the main hungry Melanie (who is the reader’s POV for they majority of the book), the one we most see the world view from but, not nearly as much as that point of view is dominant in the movie... escapes with her crush of a school teacher Miss Justineau, the cruel Dr. Caldwell and two military men... when the military base they inhabit is breached by ‘junkers’, using hungries almost as a weapon to gain entrance. The book then, like the film, becomes a ‘road’ novel about trying to survive and thrive in what’s left of England, primarily trying to get through London.

The junkers are feral humans uninfected with the fungal virus which has turned most of mankind into eating machines but they weren’t included in the movie version. I actually prefer the cinematic view of the story in terms of this element as it’s simpler and, to my mind, the junkers don’t seem to achieve too much in the story except in terms of just giving the main characters something else to be wary of and think about.

I’m not going to spoil the ending of this novel but it is explained early on about a real life fungal virus which infects insects such as ants called ophiocordyceps unilateralis... which sticks to certain species and then takes control of their brains before making them climb the nearest tree, so a small tree-like substance can grow out of their head to release more spores. It’s a frightening concept and one which is well and truly alive in the world as we know it already. What M. R. Carey has done is to be inspired by this fungus, to some extent.... saying what would happen if something like this was able to infect the human race. Again, without giving too much away, this really made me appreciate the wonderful ending of the movie (which is very much reiterated in the novel) in a whole new light.

Similarly, there’s an early reference to Salvador Dali’s famous painting Autumnal Cannibalism which really pushes the metaphor about the human race, the global chaos ensuing from the initial outbreak and the species’ future trajectory. It’s possibly a bit too ‘on the nose’ right now with the state of global politics both here in the UK and farther afield but I enjoyed the shout out and, yeah, it makes one think about just what the author is trying to say here.

Carey occasionally shifts the viewpoint away from Melanie at certain times but, as I said, it’s primarily about her and the way she experiences the world as a ten year old girl. How long she’s been a ten year old girl, however, is up for debate but she’s certainly, especially in the novel where you are able to share every character’s thoughts, way more intelligent for her years. So she grasps situations very quickly and this makes her a much more dangerous character, in some ways, than the possibility that if she’s not very guarded with her own self awareness, she may accidentally eat the people around her.

And, yeah, this is a short review but I’ve not got too much to say. If you want to know more, I would happily point you to the spoiler free review of the movie I wrote a few years ago (right here) and recommend a read or a watch of this magnificent tale, in any media you wish to visit it in. The Girl With All The Gifts is a truly wonderful and interesting book and, although I was put off by one character in one passage seeming to know something about which she (or any of the others) couldn’t possibly have knowledge of, I found myself fascinated by the use of the child’s viewpoint which the writer throws himself into here. I’ve just discovered that Carey has also written a prequel to this book, The Boy On The Bridge... so that one’s definitely going to have to be a future purchase for sure. Straight onto the Christmas list.

Top 20 Movies of 2016

Top 20 Movies of 2016

Okay... so here we go with the annual, scary to put together list of the best movies of the year. Despite popular opinion, I don’t think it’s been a bad year for movies and my cinema visits seemed a little more frequent than usual as a result. Perhaps my biggest disappointment of the year is the fact that we had both a new Star Trek and a new Star Wars movie and neither of them were good enough to make it into my list. And nobody is more upset about that than me, I reckon. Still, without further ado, here’s my list for this year in reverse order. Hope you like...

20. Mermaid (aka Mei Ren Yu) 3D
Directed by Stephen Chow, this large budget comedy telling a charmingly small moral fable is more hit than miss and it’s one of the more unusual movies to be released at British cinemas this year. My full review can be found here...

19. Green Room
This taut, gritty and harrowing drama about a bunch of musicians trapped in a nightclub is made even more poignant in light of the death of one of its leading actors, Anton Yelchin (who played Pavel Chekhov in the last three Star Trek movies). Another long term Star Trek stalwart, Patrick Stewart, appears here in a role in which he manages to be absolutely downright villanous. Not a movie I could sit through again but that’s no reason not to proclaim it one of the best of 2016. My review is here.

18. The Nice Guys
Funky, 1970s set action thriller/comedy written and directed by one of the great screenplay writers in Hollywood, Shane Black. The music by John Ottman and David Buckley alone is worth looking at this one for. My review here.

17. Doctor Strange
The second best of the many superhero movies released this year sees Benedict Cumberbatch breath life into the quirky, psychedelic 1960s Marvel character that the movie is based on. He’s well supported by the always watchable Tilda Swinton and the always listenable Michael Giacchino. My review can be found here...

16. Train To Busan
In a year perhaps less likely than some, we have three first class zombie movies coming along at once. The first of my picks in this category which make it into my list is the darling of the FrightFest, Train To Busan... which is about as good a ‘zombies on a train’ movie as you’re likely to see. My review can be unearthed here.

15. Women Who Kill
This witty and acerbic comedy with an edge is all about two ex-lovers who put out a radio show about their favourite female serial killers and the depths their obsession with these kinds of people takes one of them. I really hope that this gets some kind of Blu Ray or DVD release over here because I think more people should know about this one than they do. My review can be found here...

14. Respectable - The Mary Millington Story
Simon Sheridan’s documentary about the life and tragic death of Britains most famous porn star was more or less, apart from the odd one off showing, a straight to DVD movie over here. This is a shame because it well deserved a proper cinema release, as far as I’m concerned. My review of this one is here.

13. Sadako VS Kayako
This is what happens when a company jokes about making a movie combining the main monsters from their Ring and The Grudge franchises and the Japanese public buy into this bizarre idea so much that it’s decided to make the movie for real, after all. This is a cheesy but very fun take on the two franchises all rolled up into one outrageous confection. I just hope it can get some distribution either here or in the US sometime soon. My review here.

12. Paterson
What can you say about Jim Jarmusch? Still very much an independent spirit and still churning out non-commercial films which he somehow manages to get financed. One of the great artists of American cinema and this is another movie that demonstrates why. My review of this one can be found here.

11. The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case
Although this is not the masterpiece that the original The Conjuring was, this movie still has a certain charm to it... not least in the personalities of the two, true life protagonists and the actors who bring them to life. This one is set not too far from where I live so I was really chomping at the bit to see this (especially since the first movie is so wonderful). This one manages to link the famous tale of the Enfield poltergeist to the events surrounding The Amityville Horror... which I don’t believe for a second but it’s a nice little movie. My review is here...

10. 10 Cloverfield Lane
This claustrophobic tale of a serial killer and two potential victims under lock down dovetails into the same cinematic universe as the original Cloverfield... both as the thing the writer uses to set up the scenario of the main movie with and then, big time, for the last quarter of an hour or so of the story. This one is all about the performances and the way the director shoots the small environment in which the majority of the tale takes place. My review is right here...

9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Wasn’t expecting this potentially one joke wonder of a novel (which I’ve not read) to be the basis of such a strong movie but this one is a real joy to watch. It’s smart and it has a lot of fun with the parallel world created by the cast and crew. Well worth a look and the second of this year’s three unexpected zombie entries on the list. My review here.

8. Zoology (ala Zoologiya)
It’s to be seen as to whether this Russian/French/German production about a woman who grows a tail and loses her inhibitions art the same time will get a proper release in English speaking countries but, if it does come out next year and you get the opportunity to see it... just go. My review is here...

7. Spotlight
Again, true this story about the investigative efforts of a small team of journalists is probably not something I could watch that often... but it is a quality production to rival some of the greats of that genre such as All The President’s Men. It would be tempting to overplay the subject matter and make it a much more syrupy production than is necessary but, luckily, the writer and director steer clear of going down that route. My review is here.

6. Deadpool
Probably the most popular superhero movie made in a long time, Deadpool, like the comic it’s based on, breaks the fourth wall continuously and still manages to let the audience feel comfortable with it dropping itself into the main cinematic X-Men timelines (which, to be fair, are so screwed up and out of any serious continuity with each other that it hardly matters at this point). My review of this gem of a masked vigilante movie can be found here.

5. I, Daniel Blake
This completely depressing and genuinely moving film is, if anything, a little more glossy and glam in its portrayal of the kinds of poverty and injustice I have seen going on in this country. That being said, this one really drives all its points home and, if the ending is just a little bit of a cliché, you can only forgive it that indulgence in the light of the kind of everyday tragedies it’s talking about. My review of this one is here.

4. The VVitch
This movie had the most bizarre and abusive audience reaction I’ve ever seen... with people laughing and shouting back at the screen or leaving in droves throughout. And my understanding is that this audience interaction with the film was far from an isolated incident. Either way, I kinda loved the slow burn and the very rewarding ending to the movie and I think this one will get the odd revisit by me over the years to come. Here’s my review.

3. Hail, Caesar!
I don’t know why this one seemed to fail with audiences, from what I can gather, but I think this is one of The Coen Brother’s greatest movies... right up there with The Big Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn’t There. It’s absolutely wonderful for people who are into the history of American cinema and... well if you’re reading this blog then that must include you, right? My review of this gem is here.

2. Prevenge
Alice Lowe wrote, starred in and directed this black comedy about a woman driven to serial murder on the instructions of her unborn child while she was, herself, pregnant. Which is surely no mean feat. It’s a bit of a masterpiece and I really hope this gets a proper cinema and home video release (so I can repeat watch the thing) sometime very soon. My review is here.

1. The Girl With All The Gifts
And so, against all the odds, a low budget zombie movie takes my top spot of the films of the year. This isn’t just any zombie movie, however. It’s British made and it manages to be genuinely suspenseful for what is, essentially, a post-apocalyptic road movie. It also manages to have an unexpected story arc to fulfil before the movie is done with and it honestly feels like what would have happened if somebody had asked the late British science fiction writer John Wyndham to have a crack at writing a zombie novel. There’s a little more to this evocative concoction than you may, at first, suspect or realise. My review of this gift of a movie is here.

And that’s me done with this for another year. In a couple of weeks, when I’ve finished evaluating the contenders, I’ll post my favourite movie score releases of the year. Some of these may overlap with this list and... well... I suspect some of them really won’t. So maybe come back and have a read of that at some point. In the meantime, it’s still not quite too late to enter my annual, cryptic movie quiz (just click here) and there’ll be some more reviews coming soon.

The Girl With All The Gifts

Gift It Through The X-Shop

The Girl With All The Gifts
2016 UK/USA Directed by Colm McCarthy
UK cinema release print.

Wow. This is amazing. It’s rare that a movie quite lives up to the intrigue and power of the way the trailer for the release has been cut and, since The Girl With All The Gifts had such a wonderfully intriguing trailer, I was expecting something quite good from it, to be sure but... nowhere near the powerful cinematic experience that this film delivers on pretty much every level.

I’ll start of with what is becoming an increasingly frequent caveat in regards to a lot of book to film adaptations recently, to my shame. This film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by M. R. Carey and, alas, it’s not one I’ve read. I can’t, therefore, tell you how successful it is in terms of translating the source but I do know that, despite the novel and the screenplay being written kind of simultaneously (is my understanding of it), there are some elements from the book which didn’t make it into the movie and, also, the physical descriptions of some of the characters are way off.

That being said, and as I’ve mentioned many times before on here, movies aren’t books and adaptation from one format or another means making artistic choices which can benefit one medium at the expense of elements of the other and... this one is no different, I’m guessing.

What I do know for sure, and without giving away any spoilers, is that we have a British zombie movie which, while the writer and director disown the term ‘zombies’, instead going for the term ‘hungries’, is one of the best post-Romero zombie movies around and stands head and shoulders with other modern classics of ‘infected, zombie like’ creatures as the films in the [oREC] and 28 Later series. Whether the humans have died and come back or, in the case of some of these pseudo-zombie films, had their humanity and higher intelligence killed off by the virus to effectively create the same thing, is kind of a moot point in terms of this cultural phenomenon which started, as far as I can remember, in the early 19th Century.

The film introduces us to Melanie (played by Sennia Nanua) and, indeed, takes her viewpoint during the whole running time. She is one of a bunch of children who share the same... shall we say ‘eating habits’... as the ‘hungries’ that the last pockets of humanity are trying to keep at bay and find a cure for. I won’t give you the full history of how and why these children exist because it’s got a classic horror twist and it’s a nice moment when Doctor Cladwell (played by Glenn Close) reveals this history to Melanie. The film centres around the child, her adoration for her teacher Miss Justineau (played by Gemma Arteton) and her role within a group of survivors of an attack on their base camp including Caldwell, Justineau, Sgt. Eddie Parks (played by Paddy Considine) and Dillon (played by Anthony Welsh).

It’s very much a road movie as the small group try to find their way to some kind of safety and, all the while, with the exception of Miss Justineau, they are as much afraid of Melanie, as they are of the ‘hungries’ who they spend so much of their time trying to avoid contact with. Like most good zombie movies, and I don’t know if this is also true of the book, we never really know the details of the apocalyptic virus and how it first started but, having plunged us right into this world, the Doctor (and the writer) does have a good idea of the life cycle of the virus and, by the time we get to the last third of the movie, it becomes a key thing to understand the way the story evolves... not necessarily taking you to the place you’re kind of expecting it to in the same way you thought it would. Not quite, anyway... although the ending is quite familiar but also so much more than you would normally get from this kind of movie. It’s a good ‘un but, again, in the interests of not spoiling this for anybody... I’ll keep that to myself. I think John Wyndham would have loved this movie, though.

As you would expect from a film with a cast like this, there is some absolutely powerhouse acting going on. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for both Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine and, as you would expect, they totally knock it out of the park and are ably supported by Anthony Welsh. Glenn Close, on the other hand, is an actress I’ve never really liked all that much. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an absolutely incredible performer and you can’t fault her work... but she’s never really appealed to me. However, having said that, I think she’s got a real great role here which is perfect for her as a kind of ‘almost but not quite, depending on your moral point of view villain’ in the form of Dr. Caldwell and, yeah, she owns the role totally.

And then we have Sennia Nanua’s central performance as Melanie.

What can I say? I don’t know where they get some of these child actors from but some of them are amazing and, surrounded by some interesting and incredible child co-stars for certain scenes, Nanau manages to deliver an absolutely gobsmacking performance filled with all the subtlety and nuance that you might expect from someone three times her age (whatever that is, there seems to be no information present about that at time of writing this). Given that it’s a movie that someone her age presumably wouldn’t be allowed to legally see in this country, she does wonders here eating and biting her bloody way through various life forms and I can only applaud her performance whole heartedly.

Saying that, it’s not a very scary movie, at least in terms of the expected jump scares that a modern ‘horror film’ might be expected to supply. As far as I’m concerned, however, that just cements the link between this movie and the wealth of zombie movies which have come before. Aside from, maybe, the [oREC] series, which is genuinely scary for the first two outings, this takes its cue from the traditional zombie ‘survival horror’ strand of cinema and it does it very well... with a visceral suspense that slowly builds throughout the movie to its, really very satisfying, conclusion.

And then there’s the music. Oh, I wish there was a CD release of this thing already because the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is almost overwhelming in its power and raw beauty and, for a change, it’s been mixed right into the foreground so the movie gets an amazing lift of emotional, brain churning intensity. The opening sequence, for example, is very good but it really gets a sense of rising dread infused into it by the slowly building chanting and humming that plays out throughout certain passages of the movie, sometimes with metallic percussion at points. It’s really a magnificent work and it would be a major crime against filmanity, not to mention musicology, if this remains unreleased on CD. Hopefully some smart record label will try and pick this one up.

And that’s about it as far as The Girl With All The Gifts is concerned. An all round major achievement of intense suspense, zombie mayhem, some very sly and dark humour (the audience I was with were very appreciative of a certain line about whether Melanie would like a cat) and, right near the end, a moral question about the nature of a life form which, when finally answered, seals the fate of the world. An absolutely blistering and brilliant piece of cinematic art and absolutely one to run to as quickly as you can if you’re a fan of zombie movies. A real gem which I will be telling everyone about.