Review of The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) by Kieran M — 14 Oct 2017

I quite liked the young adult novel by M.R. Carey this film is based upon, but I found myself sorely disappointed by the film version. The story is an interesting one. In a future where a world has been overrun by zombies, here called "hungries," scientists on a military base are studying a group of intelligent child zombies as a potential source for a cure to the zombie outbreak.

Thing go awry, as with most zombie stories, when the base is breached and a teacher, an intelligent zombie girl, a pair of soldiers, and a scientist are forced to flee their sanctuary on a road trip to London, which they hope is still surviving and can provide safe haven.

This film adaptation has a strong cast, a script written by the original author, and solid production values. However, I was struck that although the film was faithful to the source material, it was so abridged that it lacked any depth.

There was so much story to cover that the filmmakers had to race to get to it all, which in the end rendered the story a fairly straightforward action/adventure tale and left out major elements of the book.

Now don't get me wrong. I can care less if a film adaptation is loyal to it's source material as long as it was done well. John Ford's adaptation of "The Grapes of Wrath" is a masterpiece, even though it completely leaves out the last third of the book.

Then you have the opposite with someone like Erich Von Stroheim who in 1924 filmed almost every paragraph of the novel McTeague in a wildly long 8-hour film adaptation. "The Girl with All the Gifts" isn't a bad film, but it really should have been an 8-part mini-series to tell the story it wanted to tell.

SPOILER ALERT! I was also surprised at the change to the book's ending. The film's ending allowed the teacher to remain human and to continue teaching a group of zombie children versus the book's ending where she is turned into a zombie who would continue to teach the zombie children.

The movie ending has hope for humanity, whereas the book's ending has humanity ending and being replaced by an inevitable heir, which was the logical ending and the next step for this new world, even if it was a sad ending.

Overall, this was a very good book, but only a mildly diverting film.