Cameron Baird

The ending of this movie is not deserving of a 2 star review, but the beginning and the journey itself warrant it. Were the ending to be tossed out this would easily be a 3-4 star film. [Spoilers beyond this point] The beginning of the movie itself was fantastic. A coming of age story of a boy and his father during the zombie apocalypse, some decades after the height of the infection. There was intrigue and tension as well as a powerful reference to the life of the survivors in this state of the world. Then, unfortunately, by the hour mark the movie quickly began to go downhill, faster than I could care to keep up with. First, there was the mother saving her son in an anticlimactic fashion, and was itself dubious at best considering her state with little explanation. However, one could look past this. The infected themselves, and the direction that the movie seemed to be going was intriguing enough to engage me; however, I knew that the directors had decided to go for academy awards and artsy BS instead of satisfying fans when they had a random infected woman, just thrown into the story, and birth a non-infected fetus. The fetus really serves ZERO narrative purpose to the plot of the film aside from the overly artsy overtone of its grand message - Memento Mori - which could have easily been conveyed without sacrificing the monstrous nature of the infected, which are supposed to be the whole point of a zombie movie. Instead, the director decided it was a good to humanize them in a variety of ways, all while duplicitously depicting them as monsters but with some borderline animalistic undertone, which could have been interesting in another approach. The overall theme of memento mori was actually fantastic, and would have served an excellent role in the movie had the director just taken a little more care and not tried to go for the artsy approach. However, there is absolutely nothing that can possibly forgive the ending, which completely ruined the whole experience. Were the ending to have concluded in much the same fashion as the 2008 "The Incredible Hulk" where Bruce Banner walks into the backdrop, then this movie could have easily accomplished a unilateral 4 star rating. While albeit, a far more unoriginal ending, it would have satisfied the intention of the director while not betraying the whole of the fanbase Should you decide to watch the film, go ahead and do so, but when you are at the end with the campfire I would strongly implore to stop watching there otherwise your experience will be ruined as the ending serves absolutely zero purpose for the whole of the film Overall, it seemed as though the director had zero idea on where they were planning to take the film, little to no plan, and absolutely zero ambition