Robert C. O’Brien, Nissar Modi, and Craig Zobel, 2015
#201, 2015 Skandies
Hey, how about that! Eleven months after I started in on the films of 2015, and I have reached the end. At this rate, I should be completely caught up by the year 2092!
Why would I watch the 201st-highest-placing movie of the year? Mainly because I remembered reading the book. Note: this is not the same as actually remembering the book. But I did remember reading it. As a kid, I had read and loved Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and when for my tenth birthday I got a copy of O’Brien’s The Silver Crown, I read that too and had a leveling-up experience. (Never had I read a book that starts with the protagonist going off to play in the park and then coming home to find that her family has been killed in a terrorist attack.) In grad school, I decided to read the rest of O’Brien’s work, so I got and read copies of A Report from Group 17 and Z for Zachariah. (Or, as my Canadian friend Mandy put it when she visited one afternoon: “Hey, you’ve got ‘Zed for Zachariah’!”) What I remembered: nuclear war has devastated the world, but has miraculously spared one small valley in Appalachia, now inhabited only by a single teenage girl, Ann. One day, a man in a radiation suit appears in the valley. And… that was about it. So I fired up this movie. Initially I was nodding along—yup, that’s the book I read 25 years ago. And then, the proverbial needle scratch. Wait, I don’t remember that! What the what?
I did some brushing up on the novel to make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me. Sure enough, it wasn’t: it turns out that the original Z for Zachariah was a twist on the myth of Adam and Eve. (Hence the title: Ann has a Biblical A‑B‑C book, and A is for Adam, the first human. Z is for Zachariah, and Ann muses that, logically, he should be the last human.) The man in the radiation suit sees the valley as a new Eden, a chance to start the species anew. Ann imagines a wedding, and seems like she could be amenable, after she and this man have built a bond of trust. But developing a partnership has no place on the man’s agenda—as far as he’s concerned, restarting humanity is his project, and Ann is just breeding stock. And so, subverting the Eden story, this time around Eve decides that if this is what starting a species entails, she has other plans. What the film does, halfway through, as this version of Ann and the radiation suit guy are getting a sense of each other, is… bring in another guy. Which turns what had been a play on Genesis into an episode of The Post-Apocalyptic Bachelorette. The story of Adam and Eve and Kyle. Theme loses out to the question of which guy Ann will pick and whether one of the guys will off the other one. It’s almost as if what critics deem the 201st-best movie of the year may not be very good!
(On the other hand, it’s way better than the 204th‑rated movie, Gaspar Noé’s Love. I guess past me didn’t realize it was Noé’s? Or copied-and-pasted it by accident? I found it just as insufferable as everything else I’ve seen of Noé’s, and shut it off a few minutes into the protagonist’s excruciating voiceover.)
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