I don’t think they did learn that. I think they were just following him when he trapped himself in an enclosed space for them. The actual “lure” was the rat and that (as he thinks in the book) shouldn’t have worked because he doesn’t want to eat rat, but he falls for it for entirely different reasons than the ones they understand.
Your hilarious lift/thrust discussion in the podcast reminds me about this awesome CollegeHumor sketch:
I just watched this yesterday and really enjoyed both the movie and the podcast, as I didn’t see the movie in the same way at all as any of our three guys, which was a first for me.
Foremost, Tom claims this is a zombie movie but I don’t agree. Maybe an apocalyptic one? To me, the movie is more of a simple allegory, and I’d be hard-pressed to put it in a genre.
Now, I am not much familiar with the zombie genre, excepting for the short course of education a certain Dr. Chick provided us on Youtube on the matter, but the bit that makes me disagree this is a zombie movie is that there is never any “friendly faces turning onto you” aspect to this movie. The zombies could be bears in a reserve: they are just hungry animals — not very horrific or unsettling, but very threatening. This was shown in the rest of “food” they leave behind: it is not the gratuitous, weird (braains) and unsettling violence I am used from zombies; they are really feeding on the corpses, leaving carcasses for the scavengers, like predators would. This is also why I didn’t mind Melanie not feeding on the soldiers during the assault sequence: she just protects her teacher, and she’s been fed with worms that morning.
To me the movie was a quite straight transposition of Pandora’s myth, but putting us humans as the gods, and it is that precise overstretch that will eventually put ourselves in jeopardy.
My point of view is that Melanie is not deciding anything at all: from start to finish, to me, she is just curious, starving even more for curiosity than for meat.
It is why I am okay with her getting over her hunger in the couple of scenes it is on display.
That same curiosity is what draws her to lite the fire in my mind. She is as curious as her illustrious ancestor. The last bit of hope at the bottom of the movie being our Pandora herself: while we are told of a new cycle of life on earth, one that we won’t be part of, she saves that last bit of our culture to be carried on in that new world.
This is also the same starvation for knowledge and experience, to me, that makes her refuse to die to Glenn Close (beyond simple survival instinct, and the real possibility the scientist has been lying from the start about that Deus Ex Machina of a cure, as is my opinion.).
On that point, my read is that the scientist destroyed the world in this story: nurturing those kids in that base, and amongst them, Melanie, is what brought eventually the absolute end of the world - as typed earlier, humans playing gods. Although my belief is that the world was already over anyway, as every enclaves seem to be falling and the little crew we are following appears to be running out of options.
The true hope may not thus be survival, but rebirth, if not for the tear in the teacher’s eye at the end, which was quite crushing for me and made the ending extra ambiguous. I loved that unsettling feeling!
I have one logical issue with the ending: if everything is contaminated with the spore and since it is shown it doesn’t prey on itself — excepting for that chained dude who bit his own arm off; what a great sequence! —, what are they planning to eat?
I do agree with everybody (even @marquac!) that the kids fighting scene was silly.
I loved some of the soundtrack of that thing. There was that progressive rock at the beginning or in the end, it gave a nice atmosphere to the unfolding mystery.
What a cool movie. Really glad you made us all watch it, Tom!
It can be that and a zombie movie. Honestly, a lot of the best zombie movies have some sort of allegorical weight.
To add to the above point, You could argue that a scene like that is a key feature of an effective zombie movie, especially if you want to form a top ten list of the best ones in the genre or something like that.
You know, like Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers is a really good werewolf movie, but it’s hardly the best one, because it doesn’t have a werewolf transformation scene. Everything happens off screen. But in the big scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a damn good werewolf movie.
You misspelled “low-budget Aliens wanna-be”. I mean, I like me some Sean Pertwee as much as the next guy, but I have my limits.
-Tom
Huh, what was wrong with dog soldiers?
Girl with all the gifts was great though. Didn’t know much about it before I saw it.
And that’s the main reason why it doesn’t have a transformation scene.
To be fair to Neil Marshall, almost all werewolf movies are ridiculous.
They’re the second dumbest monsters after mummies. They even get their asses kicked by old people who are blind:
It’s not easy to make a werewolf movie that isn’t as dumb as actual werewolfs. I can think of, umm, maybe three exceptions?
-Tom
Your first two are great choices, and where my mind immediately went, too. I’ve never heard of the third. I saw it compared to Spring in a review there on IMDB. I watched that a few weeks back. Have you seen it? How does it compare?
I wasn’t crazy about Spring, for a few reasons. I thought the lead actress was terrible. And I had pretty high hopes for the directors after Resolution, but Spring felt like a couple of dudes with a drone visiting Italy for the first time. It really is a worst-case scenario of what happens when a director discovers he can put a camera on a drone. Ugh.
When Animals Dream, on the other hand, feels like confident Scandinavian art house fare. I don’t see a lot of similarity to Spring, mainly because it’s told from the perspective of someone central to the mystery rather than someone coming to it from the outside. It might not work for everyone, but it doesn’t suffer from the usual werewolf dopiness. In fact, it’s actually a pretty good companion piece to Raw.
-Tom
How can you discount Silver Bullet? Corey Haim in a motorcycle wheelchair! Gary Busey yelling “Jesus Christ Palomino!” Everett McGill being … well, Everett McGill, which is fine.
Did you get around to seeing The Endless? I personally really liked Spring, but it’s pretty orthogonal to what they were doing in Resolution, whereas The Endless not only is much more in that vein but, uh… is sort of a sequel?. It’s nothing to do with werewolves or indeed The Girl With All the Gifts, but I’m curious.
Thanks! I didn’t really like Spring, either. My main comparison to it was ‘The Man From Earth’- they were both small, with a small cast of characters talking a lot about this weird scenario. TMFE was much better, though. The comparison to Raw helps- I loved that one. I’ll look it up!
Yeah, Endless had a really solid payoff. I still think they haven’t quite lived up the promise they showed in Resolution, but at least Endless shows they appreciate what they were able to accomplish.
Since you liked Spring, how would you rank their three movies? Resolution, Spring, and Endless?
-Tom
I’m thinking maybe Spring, Resolution, and Endless from worst to best? But the problem is I don’t actually remember Resolution well enough to rank it, having seen it years ago and only being sure I actually had seen it because I found an old comment of mine on one of the front page articles about it. I need to rewatch it. (Sadly, unlike Spring, which is on Shudder, and Endless, which is on Netflix, I don’t appear to have a streaming source for it.)
I was into Spring, but I do think it’s their weakest so far, and has some Hollywood ideas about romance and love that I can buy into for the length of a movie but which I don’t think are very healthy.
Come on guys, really? Werewolves?
I wanted to like WHEN ANIMALS DREAM more than I actually did. Maybe it jus lacked suspense.