Page to Screen: The Girl With All the Gifts (Spoilers!)

I first heard of this book back in 2016 when Rusty Webb reviewed it on Goodreads.  A while later the movie was on Amazon Prime so I bookmarked it but I hadn't gotten around to watching it when the book was on sale in the Kindle Store.  So I figured I might as well buy the book and then watch the movie afterwards.

Like Rusty I really liked the book.  It's a zombie story but it's one of those like Warm Hearts where it's not a traditional zombie story.  In this case it focuses on a 10-year-old girl named Melanie (or Test Subject #1) who is locked in a room every night after school.  The next morning soldiers come in, one pointing a gun at her while another soldier straps her down to a wheelchair.  Then she's taken to a classroom with a bunch of kids exactly like her.  Once a week the kids are fed a bowl of worms, which sustains them until the next week.

Since Melanie can't remember anything before this place, it all seems perfectly natural to her.  It's like the little boy in Room whose mother was kidnapped and locked in a room and then gave birth to him; he doesn't realize there's a whole world beyond the confines of his prison.  Nor does Melanie, though she loves to hear her favorite teacher Miss Justineau's stories, especially the Greek myth of Pandora, the girl who was created by Zeus to open a box of horrors, at the bottom of which was one final thing:  hope.  Except for the being strapped down and eating worms Melanie seems like a bright little girl, maybe a bit too much of a teacher's pet type.  You know, the one who always raises her hand and knows all the answers?  The one who'd ask for more homework?

The thing is, though, Melanie is a "hungry" or a zombie.  The author makes no attempt to hide this; it's pretty much the first paragraph describing her as extremely pale and then the being locked up and being fed worms.  And then it also cuts to Miss Justineau, who has a conflicted relationship with her students and Dr. Caldwell, who wants to cut them up and find out what makes them tick--and whether they can cure the plague.  There's also Sgt Parks, a man with a badly scarred face who is in charge of the base they're on, especially securing the students.  He and soldiers like Private Gallagher went out into the ruins of the world and found these strange zombies who seem almost normal.

So then one day Parks takes Melanie to a different place:  Dr. Caldwell's lab.  She's learned all she can from other students so now she wants the best.  Parks leaves as there's a commotion outside the base.  Then Justineau busts in to try saving Melanie, though she's hit with pepper spray.  Hungries are attacking the base and eventually some get inside the lab, killing Dr. Caldwell's assistant and injuring her hands.  Melanie escapes and rescues Miss Justineau by eating a couple of men.

Eventually Melanie, Miss Justineau, Parks, Gallagher, and Dr. Caldwell get in a Humvee and escape into the woods.  Since they can't raise anyone at their headquarters of "Beacon," they decide to head south to get to the place.  Melanie is chained up; she still doesn't full understand what she is, but she has an inkling of it.

Their Humvee breaks down so they have to go on foot.  They stop in a couple of smaller towns, avoiding hungries and "Junkers," survivalists who haven't been turned but roam the land scavenging and basically living like savages.  It was the Junkers who sicced the hungries on the base to destroy it and the lab and everything.  Along the way Melanie proves herself as a scout to Parks while Miss Justineau and Parks get fairly close one night after they find some booze.  Miss Justineau confesses that before the plague 20 years earlier she had killed a kid by accident; before she could bring herself to tell someone the plague hit and there was no one to tell.  Dr. Caldwell's hands are getting worse, but she manages at one point to snag some brain tissue from a dead hungry to study later.

Eventually they get to London and find some really weird shit like hungries who have just fallen down and sort of mushroom-type things have sprouted out of them.  There's also a sort of wall made by fungus strands.  Melanie gets behind it and finds sort of trees with pods that Dr. Caldwell says are spores that could infect the whole world if they eventually open up.

Also in London they find this huge, armored vehicle.  It was a mobile lab sent into the city years earlier to study the plague and find a cure.  There's no one in the vehicle except the driver who shot himself.  While Parks tries to get the thing working so they can use it to drive to safety, Dr. Caldwell fires up the scientific equipment.

While Melanie is out, she goes into a theater and sees a group of kids hunting rats.  She soon realizes the kids are like her!  Except they never went to school so they're primitives for the most part.  They're led by a boy who has painted up his face like a mask of a monster and carries a baseball bat.

That night Private Gallagher sneaks out of the vehicle to go off on his own.  Some of the feral kids find him and kill him.  Their leader takes his jacket to wear as a trophy.  Parks and Justineau go to find him while Dr. Caldwell stays behind.  She's tricked into going outside and nearly killed by the feral kids.  She's able to kill one of them and take some of its brain tissue.  When Melanie comes back, Dr. Caldwell no longer has any interest in cutting her up: there would be no point in it as there is no cure to be had.  Melanie and those feral kids are a second generation of hungries, born from other hungries.  As weird as it is to think about, apparently zombies could have sex and conceive!  While in normal humans the plague is devastating, in the second generation the plague stabilizes so they can be pretty much normal with proper guidance.

Parks and Justineau find Gallagher but then are beset by the feral kids.  Melanie comes to their rescue and takes on the lead feral kid.  When she defeats him that makes her their new leader.  But by then Parks has been bit so Melanie puts him down at his request.  She then gets Justineau back to the lab and locks her in.

Later Melanie sets fire to the weird trees and pods, causing them to hatch.  Spores are released into the air and presumably they'll be spread by the winds to the rest of Britain and maybe even the world.  When Melanie goes back to the vehicle she tells Miss Justineau it was the only way to save the world because eventually humans (normal and Junkers) and hungries would have destroyed everything.  So now there will be no more humans, only hungries.  She brings the feral kids to the vehicle and Miss Justineau starts to teach them, only now she's the one locked in a cage.

The end was somewhat obvious as the Pandora symbolism was pretty evident.  I mean, you know Melanie is Pandora and has to empty out the box of evil while leaving some hope for the future.  Once the big weird plants are introduced it became fairly clear what she was going to do.  Still, it was a nice twist though that instead of saving OUR world, she saves HER world.  Yet it doesn't feel like a betrayal, like if Luke Skywalker had saved the Empire or something, because there was no way to cure the plague.  Thus the only way for any kind of society to survive was to get rid of the old world entirely.  Though you have to wonder how long they can survive because they're carnivores so they need a source of meat.  Unless Miss Justineau teaches them how to raise livestock they'll eventually run out of food, right?

What I really liked about the book is that it does a good job of making Melanie seem like an innocent little girl--who just happens to eat people, cats, pigeons, or whatever else.  Her innocence is almost heartbreaking when you realize what's actually going on.  The other characters are all given some backstory so that not even Gallagher seems like a redshirt or Slipknot who's only there to die.

Now then, we get to the movie.  What surprised me was the author wrote the script because he really neutered his own story.  Kind of like Ernest Cline with Ready Player One I think he was a little too willing to change his story to get it on the screen.  What he ends up doing is cutting basically all the backstory and most of the stuff in the school, pretty much turning all his characters flat.  The script doesn't even convey Melanie's innocence all that well or her growth as it's in too much of a rush to get from one place to another.  Some of that might have been the director and producers cutting for time, but the end result is like a bad Cliff Notes version of the book.

There are also some poor artistic choices by the director.  Some racists "fans" might complain about Melanie being race-swapped from white to black.  That's not really the problem; the problem is the director has Melanie and the other kids look normal.  They're not supposed to look normal; they're supposed to look like death warmed over--like monsters!  Like how Frankenstein's monster doesn't realize it's a monster (at first anyway) these kids don't realize they're monsters though everyone else can see it.  Similarly the removal of Parks' scar makes him less scary than he should be.  They also race-swapped Miss Justineau from black to white and in this case I think it was a bad call.  Though she's a middle-aged schoolteacher, Miss Justineau is kind of a badass in the book, like Pam Grier in Jackie Brown or something; she's not some frumpy, bookish white girl.  They didn't really make any changes to Dr. Caldwell but they never really get into her backstory, which is that she was one of the alternates to go on the armored vehicle they find in London.  So it's kind of sweet revenge when she finds it later.  Also it brought home some of the desperation as the best and brightest are gone and all that humanity has left are also-runs like her.  Gallagher is basically a redshirt in this as they never get into his backstory, about how he pretty much grew up with this world his entire life with only a vague memory of anything else.

There are no mentions of the Junkers so there's no real reason the hungries are suddenly able to storm the base.  Most of the journey to London is cut out so basically they get there in a day.  That also cuts out a lot of time the characters had to bond or to divulge any history.

But probably the worst change is that Dr. Caldwell never tells Melanie there is no cure.  She still thinks there is a cure when Melanie destroys the world.  So now it does seem pretty selfish of Melanie to destroy humanity because it seems like an alternative was available.  There also seemed some insinuation at the end that Parks might be Melanie's father because Dr. Caldwell says the babies came from mothers who were infected after conceiving and he knew a woman who was 7 months pregnant when she disappeared; I guess the producers or studio weren't comfortable with the idea of zombie sex so they changed it.  Like most of the changes, not for the better.

Normally I say either the book and movie are the same or the movie is just a shorter way to get the gist of the book.  In this case I definitely recommend the book.  It's a lot better.  At 420 pages it'll take a little longer but it's worth it.