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.

Station Eleven

Terminal Act

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447268963

A few months ago I was absolutely bowled over by a new TV miniseries which I watched twice. It was a ten episode show called Station Eleven (reviewed here) and, by the time I was through it the first time, I realised I would have to read the original source novel, which was written by a writer I’d never heard of called Emily St. John Mandel.

And now I have and... well, for starters, it’s great.

I think sometimes it depends what iteration of a piece of art you are exposed to first as to which version you respond to better. I have a Twitter friend (thanks Laura) who said she preferred the book and I suspect, although I may be wrong, that she read the book before seeing the TV show, which was not developed or worked on by the author but by a fellow writer and friend of hers, from what I can understand. As for me... I think I’m just about coming down to preferring the TV show myself but, to be honest, it’s a really hard call. There are major differences between the two... and also many more similarities... but both are carrying the same kind of spirit within their respective media.

I’m not going to go over the basic plot again but it takes place before, during and after a pandemic of Georgian Flu has wiped out the majority of life on Earth and we get scenes of a whole bunch of characters from different times in their lives, their stories slowly developing as they brush against times and places important to other characters, to build an overreaching story arc, of sorts. The novel is split into nine sections - those being 1. The Theatre, 2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3. I Prefer You With A Crown, 4. The Starship, 5. Toronto, 6. The Airplanes, 7. The Terminal, 8. The Prophet and 9. Station Eleven... each of these subsections being split into various chapters which generally take on one or two of the characters at a time.

And I think this is a case of the TV show expanding things or taking different directions from the novel in pursuit of a ten episode adaptation and actually improving them... while at other times missing some other specific story beats, which it could perhaps have done with.

For instance, the novel starts off with exactly the same scene as the TV show, with Arthur Leander dying of a heart attack on stage and Jeevan jumping up from the audience to try and save him... also trying to comfort the younger version of Kristen, the same day that the Georgia Flu hits the city. However, unlike the TV show where Jeevan and Kirsten are bonded by the experience and the two of them start off and spend the first year or two in the apartment with Jeevan’s brother, Frank... here they part ways for good. Kirsten can’t remember in the book just how she survived the first year of the pandemic. And Jeevan holes up with Frank and has other experiences separate to hers.

So there is no amateur play adaptation of the graphic novel Station Eleven in the book, put on by Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank as there is in the show. Indeed, Station Eleven is actually a deluxe comic book of two separate issues in the novel (I’m imagining one of those square bound format style graphic novels which were all the rage in the mid-1980s now, like Batman - The Cult or Blood - A Tale). Someone on the internet said that Jeevan is a far less important character in the book than in the show but, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. He’s just a slightly different character and he does, in fact, touch other’s live (both in negative and positive ways), even if nobody remembers his name. For example, in a newspaper article from the time of the death of Leander, he’s mentioned as ‘a member of the audience’ and everyone post pandemic who reads that surviving newspaper article years later can vaguely remember him.

And he does survive in the book as he does in the show, although we are not treated to that brilliant sequence where he’s helping about 15 to 20 women give birth on the same night in a makeshift hospital upcycled from an old, abandoned supermarket. One the other hand, we do see how he once, quite negatively, touches Miranda’s life in this... on the night that she decides she needs to divorce Arthur Leander, when we become acquainted with one of the professions Jeevan has worked in over the years.

And I knew I was in the hands of a really great writer from very early on in that, Mandel really makes you feel the emotional resonance of the characters by the phrases and choices of words she uses to put across their moments. For instance, there’s a scene in the first section where she could have just said a specific character started to cry... instead, she says this, “The lights over the sea blurred and became a string of overlapping halos.” which is frankly a much better way of getting your message across, I think.

Another thing she does, to keep a sense of continuity going over the rapid ping ponging from different time shifts, is to introduce the occasional themed section, inserted into the narrative as a juxtaposition with whatever character you happen to be following at the time. So, for instance, one of these devices is an interview that Kirsten gives to a brand new, amateur newspaper in one of the new post-pandemic communities, fifteen years after the outbreak of the Georgia Flu. And, later, it makes its way into the airport to Clark (who is a lot thinner and clean shaven compared to the wonderful actor who brought him to life in the TV show) and his Museum Of Civilisation. And it’s from this article that he recognises that Kirsten is someone who would remember Arthur Leander (because, unlike the TV show, they’ve never actually met pre-pandemic).

And, yeah, I don’t think I want to say much more about the original version of Station Eleven other than... The Prophet is, amazingly, a lot less sympathetic a character than in the TV show and that another certain key character, who is visited an antagonistic, violent death in the TV version, is afforded a much more peaceful, ‘TV network unfriendly’, deliberate overdose of sleeping pills here. If you liked the TV show, then I’m pretty certain you’ll want to give this one a go... if you haven’t, well you may want to read this version first and figure out for yourself which bits have been improved and which bits have been left out, to the detriment of the show (whole characters are wiped out in the TV show while others are given more prominence, for example). Both are great and all I can say about the novel, really, is that it’s truly wonderful stuff and I’ll definitely be pursuing some of this writer’s other novels, for sure.

Carriers

Trip Tease

Carriers
USA 2009
Directed by David and Àlex Pastor
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Spoilers may infect all readers and,
also, it’s an extremely short review... sorry about that.

Sometimes you just want to watch a movie, any movie, which reflects the current times in which you are living. So, for me, any kind of post-apocalyptic viral infection movie is game right now, to remind me that we are all in the same boat and, you know, as something I can get hints and tips from on how to survive because, if my own government keeps reacting to this stupid Coronavirus disaster in a way which makes it more protracted and less reversible, we might all be in the same situation the characters in films like this find themselves in at some point very, very soon.

So Carriers stars Chris Pine as Brian, Piper Perabo as his girlfriend Bobby, Lou Taylor Pucci as his brother Danny and Emily VanCamp as Danny’s friend Kate (that's Sharon Carter to all you MCU fans). They live in a world were a lot of the population has already died out from an unnamed virus and we join them, already on the road, in a stolen car as they are on a cross country road trip for a few days, to get them to a beach that Brian and Danny used to love as kids. Now, to me, this sounds like a bad idea to begin with. I mean, what do you do for petrol if you need it? Well, the answer seems to be you get lucky (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint of how various things go down here) and steal it by force from other travellers who you, somehow, might meet on the way. Which seems pretty silly, especially when you realise just how bad things have gotten.

It’s gotten so terrible by the point that we join the four travellers that they’ve made up a set of rules to get them by, which are roughly summed up as follows:

1. Avoid the infected at all costs, their breath is highly contagious. 

2. Disinfect anything that they’ve touched within 24 hours. 

3. The sick are already dead, they can’t be saved.

So, yeah, a road trip to a favourite beach seems fraught with peril, if you ask me.

And the film does what it does, hitting all the expected points along the way. Chris Pine plays his character as an absolutely angry, low intelligence idiot. Literally the last person you would ever want to be stuck with if you were trying to survive the leftovers of a pandemic. The other three seem mostly level headed but this doesn’t stop them from occasionally, often inadvertently, breaking their own rules and getting heaps of trouble piled on them. And on their road trip, they reluctantly find themselves in a position to try and help a father (played by Christopher Meloni) and his dying, infected little girl get to a hospital which is ‘supposed’ to have some miracle cure (yeah, you can guess how that one pans out), come across a bunch of aggressive survivalists, hide from groups of people who hunt others and so on and so forth. They also kill innocent people to further their cause for the next full tank of gasoline and, inevitably, leave their own companions behind at the first sign that any of them are infected, putting them in a position at some point where one brother has to kill another so the pointless road trip can be continued.

The actors are all good and, while not remarkable, the film is competently put together and I had no complaints. There are also some nice little nods to science fiction movies from the past such as Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior and A L I E N, among others I’m sure I didn’t pick up so, yeah, it’s an okay watch. The only real problem the film has is that, by the time two of the travellers finally make it to the beach, the objective of the trip has lost all meaning and there’s a point in the last ten minutes of the film where you really wonder why the characters are trying to fulfil that story arc at this point. So, by the end of the film, it all seems pretty pointless and downbeat. And, I get that this is kind of the point anyway but, you know, I already got that vibe from the start of the movie. It feels like there was never any progression to the story for the characters to be let down by at the end. I think there needed to be more of a point to their quest because, really, the disappointment voiced by one of the characters at the finish could easily be met by the audience with a collective shrug and the response... well yeah, what did you expect?

And with that... I don’t really have that much more to say about Carriers. As post apocalyptic movies go, it just feels kinda empty and undeveloped in many ways. It’s not something that’s going to haunt me at any point or even linger in my memory for much longer than me writing this review, I suspect. But, it is entertaining enough to the point that it held my interest for the short running time so, yeah, it’s certainly not a total loss. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to watch it but I’m not giving up on finding another post-virus apocalypse movie that I can recommend. The hunt continues.

Host

Zoom With A View

Host
UK 2020 Directed by Rob Savage
ShudderHouse

Warning: This review hosts spoilers.

You know I may be getting a little jaded because this film is far from original in it’s ideas and intentions but then again, there’s not much new left in the world and I have to admire the writers Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd... and the director (again, Savage) for conceiving, shooting and releasing a film in a totally socially distanced manner during the first six months of the Coronavirus lockdown. Also for taking an old fashioned dash of horror film movie making which, obviously, we’ve all seen before... and telling it through new technology which has become one of the communication tools of the lockdown, the Zoom meeting. And, yeah, it’s a movie about some people ‘holding a seance’ over Zoom. An obvious idea but, if done right, it can still be quite effective. Spoiler... it’s done quite well.

And, yes, we’ve seen a few movies set on computer laptops now, for sure. I think the best one I’ve seen before this was actually not a horror film but a murder mystery movie called Searching (reviewed here) and the strength of that particular film was, the twist ending would have been so obvious if it were not for the fact that telling it through the technology like they did meant they could distract you to the point where the 'reveal' genuinely takes you by surprise. Now, Host (one of a gazillion movies already called Host, The Host, Hosts or The Hosts... why they do this I’ll never know), doesn’t have that kind of surprise element involved in it but, that’s okay, it’s a horror movie and they’re not especially going for surprises here anyway, I think.

What we do have... and I think this will annoy some viewers (especially those as old as me), is a bunch of old clichés reshot through the lens of a new format... and that’s perfectly fine for a horror film. That kind of story really depends, not on the originality of the piece but whether the timing of the jump scares, in this case, are well enough done. Now, I know it’s a well put together movie because, for once, even though I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen in the final moments... and I was right... the final shot still made me jump out of my skin. Which is a very welcome result as far as I’m concerned.

Okay, so lets look at some of the moments that detractors might think of as weaknesses...

 Well, the whole film is set and shot in a zoom meeting utilising special effects, presumably added with craftily downgraded CGI afterwards. Now I’m not familiar with Zoom myself but I’ve heard that when you talk in it, your screen blows up for everyone to fill the whole frame? Well that, of course, gives the film makers an ideal opportunity of one of the mainstays of a certain type of modern horror movie, preventing you seeing what’s going on in the other places the call is taking place while one person is dominating the screen. It even means that, while I’m sure the film must be edited to death and different takes mixed together on the main zoom screen, you can easily cover your tracks by cutting away from things when you don’t like the end of a person’s performance.

Those performances here, by the way, of the seven main actresses and the lone male... Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova. Caroline Ward, Alan Emrys, Jinny Lofthouse and the amazing Seylan Baxter... are all absolutely brilliant. They’re the kind of performances you tend to get when the director is relying on no musical scoring and a POV style of shooting but, clearly, you need good actors for that kind of thing and that’s exactly what he gets here. I loved the fact, also, that the actors were all using their own first names for their characters.

Anyway, back to the clichés... well there are some obvious things the writers just want you to notice right from the start, which they deliberately call attention to. You have the character who obviously lives very near to one of the others, who talks to the other through a window, establishing that, at some point in the film, one of those two characters is obviously going to go to the other person’s apartment to see just what is going on. There’s also another character who has a Zoom background movie of herself walking to the fridge to get a drink and... you just know that’s going to be used later as a blocking device to stop you seeing what’s really going on and then jump scaring you. Yep... check. You have the one character who leaves the call way early so you immediately assume that, when they come back later, they’re there as both an unbelieving witness to the devastation wrought by the evil spirit... who quite clearly and literally acts just the way the spiritualist who has opened up the channel to the spirit world said it might act if disrespected... and also to be quickly convinced otherwise when the demonic entity in question pays a quick visit on that channel too.

And it’s things like this and the fact that almost every character has a door open in the background so you can see into another part of their apartment, adding a lot of depth to the rooms they are Zooming from... so things can happen at the periphery of the call if you happen to be watching the right part of the screen, that might all seem a bit obvious to the average horror afficionado. And, alright, they are but... still, I have to admire what the director, working under the restrictions of shooting remotely on an actual zoom call, was going for. Especially when, you know, some of those tired old clichés of jump scares really work.

And that’s the case here. If you think the writers and director are just raiding old ghost story and possession ideas then, okay fine, they are. But that’s what pretty much all horror writers and directors do. Some do it really well, though and get away with it. I’ve also seen a number of them over the last ten years which, for one reason or another, nowhere nearly nailed it as well as this lot did so... yeah... I don’t really care. When it works it works. So... original, no. Scary... not really but those jump moments really do get you and I’m assuming that this means I was feeling a certain amount of tension already in some of the sequences. Entertaining... heck, yes. This is another nice little horror movie from somebody who obviously knows their business. I liked this one quite a lot. If you can find the right movie called Host (there’s even more than one movie called this released this year, for goodness sake) and you are a fan of horror movies... and perhaps more so if you are not and are not especially familiar with the tropes of the genre... then this one is really worth checking out sometime. Also, it’s very short at 57 minutes so, you know, easily time to fit it into your day. Give it a go.

The Satan Bug

Bug’s Bonhomie

The Satan Bug
USA 1965 Directed by John Sturges
Kino Lorber/20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

I mentioned recently in my review of The Andromeda Strain (which you can read here) that The Satan Bug was another of those great virus themed movies I’d never seen which, given that I am writing this in a semi-lockdown status in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic, is perfect viewing for this time. I also didn’t realise that Alistair MacLean, under a pen name, had written the book on which it was based and nor was I aware that one of the co-writers of the script was none other than famous novelist James Clavell (who also wrote the screenplay to the original version of The Fly, if memory serves).

So I managed to get a US Blu Ray sent over and, I have to say that, while the film isn’t exactly perfect, I was much more impressed with it than I thought I would be.

One of the reasons for that is Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film, of course, which starts the movie off just right as we go into one of those animated title sequences which could almost have been designed by Saul Bass (but wasn’t, it was by DePatie-Freleng). It’s edgy and sinister with the perfect music to push the kind of expressionistic simplifications of an animated virus depicted and certainly gives you a sense of foreboding before going into the main film...

And then, once we start the movie proper, we get some fairly typical clean looking but interesting 20th Century Fox style art direction and cinematography. I don’t know why all films in this widescreen aspect ratio by this company at the time felt like this but it certainly has a recognisable style and it actually helps with the sterile, laboratory settings of the opening movie.

The plot is simple. We start off with an extremely restrained, almost abstract in what it doesn’t show, heist on a lab (relocated to America for the movie version). After a diversion as special agent Lee Barrett (as played by George Maharis) is recruited to help out as a consultant on the robbery and its fall out, we are made aware by co-star Richard Basehart (who you might remember as the Admiral in the TV version of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea) of just how dangerous The Satan Bug of the title, which the robbers have escaped with, is.

After this, the shenanigans begin, as a psychopathic terrorist holds the world to ransom unless all war research finishes (or some such) and Lee, aided by such great actors as Dana Andrews, Anne Francis and Simon Oakland, has to try and track down where the various lethal viruses have been taken before, after witnessing the death of everybody in Florida by a milder stolen virus, Los Angeles is taken down the next day. At this point the movie kind of devolves into a standard track and chase adventure as the 'good guys' rush to keep this from happening but it keeps up the atmosphere of slow burning anxiety for most of the film although, I’ll be honest, the film does start to drag somewhat before its conclusion.

However, there is a lot which is brilliant about the film. Jerry Goldsmith’s pulsating and driven score is one of those things. Like a lot of his films where the director actually listened to him, the film is quite sparsely ‘spotted’, Goldsmith was a master of knowing when to hold the silence and only bring the music in when it was really needed... it’s mostly great stuff and you can totally hear how he would develop into his brilliant Planet Of The Apes score just a few years later. He uses those wonderful musical phrases throughout too which, I can’t really pinpoint in terms of an accurate musical reference, since I really don’t know much about music but I always think of it as his ‘bouncing ball drops’. Little musical phrases of repeat notes which last a few seconds but which get faster as they go and which remind me of a ball dropping and the thuds getting faster as they hit nearer the ground on each bounce. Sorry, that’s the only way I can think to describe it but he uses this kind of musical phrase on a number of his scores from around the period and I can always tell it’s him when I hear them.

Also, those shot set ups early on in the first twenty or so minutes of the film where everything is confined to the labs look absolutely gorgeous. It’s all so well lit with lots of pinky oranges in the lighting schemes to add contrast to the dull, clinical whites and, on occasion, the shots will cut to offices with wooden panels which pretty much mirror the same colour scheme. Since the majority of the labs are made of glass walls, we also have shots mostly made up of vertical struts which Sturges uses to split up his canvass and highlight various characters in their own slats of the screen. Again, he does this with other environments too and where a glass door may slide open to push the emphasis of one of these rectangular slabs that comprise the frame design, he will sometimes cross-cut to a shot of a solid door (such as a vault door) in another room being opened in exactly the same part of the screen. Nice stuff and it was this ‘crowded verticals’ pitched against the later shots of lone or small groups of standing figures against a sterile, US highway desert landscape that kept me interested throughout.

So... lots of visual hooks and musical candy to engage the brain for most of the film.

There are a few clunky bits too though and I especially got annoyed with something George Maharis says into a phone at one point. Interestingly, the two deaths at the start of the movie in terms of the heist sequence show no bodies or aftermath... it’s all alluded to by other characters and the focus of their attention is kept out of shot. However, when Maharis and Anne Francis find a dead body sunk and weighted down (presumably) in a swimming pool a little later, Maharis reports that they found someone... “floating at the bottom of the pool.’ Seriously? If they’re at the bottom of a pool then they’re really not floating are they? And this was written by James Clavell?

One thing which did cause me delight though was spotting some of the smaller actors who would later become much more well known. For example, a young James Hong plays one of the doctors seen at the start of the movie. It doesn’t amount to much more than a cameo but it’s nice to see how he looked back then. Similarly, one of the agents who is following George Maharis and Anne Francis when they have been captured by ‘the bad guys’ is none other than James Doohan, literally the year  before he would become a household name playing Scotty on the very first incarnation of the Star Trek TV show. It’s interesting that he has a bit of a role to play but, since actors are payed more if they have any lines to say, he manages to remain silent throughout... even though he both gets into a gunfight and then has a dramatic moment where he drops dead when exposed to a virus. It was nice to see him in a pre-Scotty role though. And, yes, a waitress in a jazz bar near the start of the film is a young Lee Remick.

And that's pretty much all I’m going to say here about The Satan Bug (or risk getting into spoiler territory)... nice shot design and lighting, a highly competent ensemble cast, some truly catchy music and, as it nears the end, maybe just a little bit dull in places. I loved it though and am planning to be watching this again some day. A good slice of mid-sixties cinematic treasure which is well worth the time of any fan of the cinematic arts... so check it out when you’ve got a moment. Watch it during a pandemic for an extra sense of authenticity.