Review of The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) by Late R — 31 Dec 2018

The cast is fantastic (Glenn Close delivers a superb performance) and it has a few interesting ideas, but it doesn't make the most of either of them and ends up being somewhat dull and unexciting, failing to strike a good balance between action and emotion. The characters are also quite bland and make a lot of predictable and stupid decisions. As a consequence, it lacks the necessary impact which even the moral dilemma regarding children doesn't manage to deliver. It's passable, I suppose, and I did enjoy the gritty, British feel, but for the most part, it's not great.

Additional note for anyone who's played the 'The Last of Us': it was impossible for me to not feel like I'm watching a worse version of the game because of just how many similarities there are in both the story and the visuals. One thing 'The Girl With All The Gifts' does better than the video game is explore the moral dilemma involved, but it still ends up having much less of an impact because of the nature of the medium - with TLOU there's a feeling of closeness and intimacy with the much more likeable, better written characters and their story-arcs because of just how much time (weeks, perhaps months) you've spent accompanying them. That's something film just can't replicate and it means it's probably going to be all the more of a disappointing experience for fans of the game.