When a nuclear device is detonated in distant London in Kevin Macdonald's How I Live Now, the petulant 15-year-old American cousin Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) reluctantly visiting cousins in the English countryside looks toward the ash-spilling sky and pouts. It's all her fault, she claims, because bad things happen wherever she goes.
This is certainly a new twist on responding to apocalypse. No matter how many people might have perished in the event, no matter how deeply into civil strife, martial law and incipient fascism the country has just plunged, Daisy, demonstrating customary adolescent solipsism, takes it personally. It's the end of the world and it's all about her.
She can be forgiven for seeing the bomb – dropped by an insurrectionary force the movie leaves only vaguely defined – as just another example of how the world conspires to wreck her day. Like most of us, she's probably seen the world brought to the brink of destruction in movies, TV shows and books more times than she can remember, and that it's actually happening this time is, at first anyway, more bummer than catastrophe.
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This will change, of course, and Macdonald's movie, based on Meg Rosoff's young adult novel, is about how this ugly new world order brings out the best and the deadliest in Daisy, as she and her young cousin Piper (Harley Bird) make their way across a lethal landscape to reunite with Edmond (George MacKay), the quietly studly cousin (by marriage, so it's cool) she was just falling for when that pain-in-the-ass Big Bang happened.
There's a decided Hunger Games vibe at play here, although Macdonald's movie is a much rougher, grittier and more violent experience than the high-gloss, theme-park fantasy bow-and-arrow survivalism of that more famously blockbustering franchise. Mixing that conspicuously English fascination with unsupervised children with a kind of punchy realism that emphasizes constant and vivid danger over triumphant heroism, How I Live Now is more like a go-girl variation on Lord of the Flies and 28 Days Later than a pop-teen feminist button-pusher. Sure Daisy turns out to be not only tough but murderously so when provoked, but the world she's in – where the countryside is filled with both rapacious brutes and dangerously twitchy soldiers – is one where she's got to get over herself to survive. She grows up because this post-nuclear England is no place for kids. A natural born leader she's not.
Although the movie has been criticized for its apparent lack of concern for the specifics of the attack on London and the brutal police-state crackdown it unleashes, this is perfectly in keeping with Daisy's own spoiled teen myopia, and if anything the obscure and weirdly remote nature of the crisis, which is always felt suddenly, as when soldiers come crashing into a barn or kids are suddenly thrown in trucks for abrupt "evacuation," makes How I Live Now a fascinating and calculated alternative to all those other movies about post-apocalyptic survivalism that folks like us and Daisy have become so inured to.
Simply by refusing to show the explosion itself except as something terribly blackening the horizon is itself a bold choice, considering how the advent of digital technology has rendered the destruction of planet Earth not only such a cinch to show, but a requirement that it be shown. We expect movies like this to trade in the spectacle of artificial total destruction, and that this one doesn't, that it instead stays on the ground with this girl who's only gradually awakening to the scale of what's going on, lends How I Live Now a kind of unnerving atmosphere that's become all but absent in so much of our doomsday entertainment.
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When you think about it, at least part of the world is lavishly destroyed on a weekly if not daily basis in our popular entertainment – superhero movies wallow in massive displays of urban collapse, zombie movies have become the survivalist's version of the Western, and terrorists infiltrate places such as the White House and MI5 with yawning regularity – which makes a movie like How I Live Now rather strangely subversive.
The fact is, when, and if, it's coming and whether or not it comes from outer space, internal conspiracy or some far corner of fundamentalist extremism, most of us will see it from Daisy's point of view: not from an eagle's-eye, flying-superhero vantage from which the carnage looks cool, and not from the thick of it where we'd never live to tell anyway. But from a distance and on the ground, and it will take us a while to comprehend that this is a lot bigger than our own inconvenience. That it's not like the movies at all.