Review of Maggie (2015) by Kevin H — 12 May 2015

The problem with this film is in the script, then the directing, then the editing. The acting suffers from all of the above, and the audience suffers from an unbelievable story. The scoring however is good, the slow strings work well here.

Clearly this film could have been fixed at the script stage, and why no one caught on to this I'll never understand. The movie starts out in a world where an incurable disease exists, and the focus of the film Maggie, has already been infected. The outcome of this infection is never in question, all of the characters know where it leads, and we see for our self the finality of being zombiefied early on. The problem here is twofold; first we have no hope that the inevitable outcome will not happen to Maggie and therefore never commit to caring about the character as much as the film wants us to. Second, is how all of the characters treat the infected. It is never believable, from the extra time the infected are allowed to be free with a publicly known infection that is decimating the population, to their friends having infected over to field parties, to all of the denial of Schwarzenegger's father character. This denial would have worked if we were given hope, something that may cause Maggie to not become fully infected, but we are given no doubt whatsoever to her outcome, and the rest is just a race to the bottom. Arnold deserves to be in a better film.

The director, Henry Hobson who worked on the title sequence from The Last of Us, an acclaimed Zombie video game for the Sony PlayStation, and hasn't done much else, is unable to save a fatally flawed script. His directing fails to find any grounded reality, or emotional dichotomy. We never really understand why Schwarzenegger's character is so stubbornly ignoring a no-hope situation, and get very little sentimental resonance in comparison to the characters melancholy sternness. The universal process for dealing with death is denial, grief and then acceptance; here we get a lot of denial, smearing's of grief and no acceptance to be found anywhere. That final stage would have at least been a bit compelling to watch, since he would have to come to terms with his greatest fears but we just don't get there. Instead the most sentimental scene is one shot of him looking at an old photo on his cell phone and then a real picture, except that the cell phone has a very large red low battery indicator right in the middle of the device. This does not help the only scene which may have resonated.

The editing, saves none of the script, nor directing problems. Many scenes just don't fit well together and some just feel the wrong take was used. One situation has Schwarzenegger's character being told he really should turn in his daughter to the authorities, then a rough and very brief cut to Maggie, who I suppose was listening in? There's no establishing shot to set this up, no idea in their fictional space of where exactly she is, and then before we can even think about it, she is gone off the screen. Another scene has Maggie talking to one of her friends who stops by, and they have very awkward chatter back and forth. Unfortunately this is not good awkward, like in the "I'm uncomfortable you're going to die" vein. Instead it is just awkward, like the scene was not scripted and two actors were just forced into some idle camera chatter. Both of these scenes should have been cut or altered.

The Scoring done by David Wingo who has certainly worked on better pictures, like 2012's Mud, produces a nice somberness using slowly drawn string instruments. It is a far more effective score then any of the scenes it accompanies.

It's a shame this film couldn't have been better, Abigail Breslin is a capable actress and has been in better movies, even better zombie movies! Having been in 2009's Zombieland as Little Rock, this is a far step down. Arnold who does double duty here as one of the producers, really deserved a better end product as he hasn't really had a strong comeback picture yet. I know he can be showcased as a good actor, but sadly everything here fails him.

In the film there is a garden scene, where daises were supposed to have been grown from seed, yet the ground around their own small base is all brown. Thus they look slapped together in a field full of holes. That pretty much sums up this movie.