Hey duders!
Many people are waiting for a The Last of Us movie, I think I just saw the "unofficial" version called The Girl with All the Gifts.
The connection to The Last of Us is actually a mild story spoiler for the movie because the movie doesn't really advertise that it's about "mushroom zombies".
Besides that, there are not that many similarities to The Last of Us story, but it's a very good story on its own where the overall setting is very reminiscent to The Last of Us universe with a very strong ending and themes that give a lot of "food for thought". I highly recommend this movie for fans of The Last of Us and fans of zombie movies that also want a little bit of a deeper meaning in their zombie movies and not just pure gore-fests. Been a while since a movie surprised me that positively, check it out if you get the chance!

I found it interesting how the swapped the race between Justinau and the girl from what it was in the book.

@humanity: While I never read the book, I have quite an interesting theory about that: There's a type of fungi that thrive under gamma radiation called radiotrophic fungi. These fungi use melanin to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy for growth and adaption to harsh environments (like Chernobyl). Gamma radiation in low levels is present pretty much everywhere, in a dystopic setting like the movies, it can be assumed that gamma radiation levels across the globe are even higher, because at least a couple of Nuclear Powerplants will have gone into a critical failure state when the hungries overran most of civilization, showering Earth with additional gamma radiation.

This would be a very beneficial environment for fungi with higher levels of melanin, basically darker skinned "mushroom people" would be more efficient at turning the gamma radiation into increased growth and adaption rates.
Which would be a pretty good explanation why Melani(e) (get it?) seems to be quite a bit "smarter/advanced" than the other (brighter skinned) hungry kids in the base. I might just be interpreting things there that where never meant to be interpreted in that way. None the less, imho it's kinda of neat explanation for swapping races.

The more common (less interesting) explanation being: Afaik in the book the kid is blonde and blue eyed, which would be quite a disturbing visual to have at the end of the movie. A light skinned, blue eyed blonde kid "bossing around" a boxed in black woman might not go along with the more sensitive people and could be interpreted in a very nasty way.

Oh, hey, my girlfriend is reading that book, right now. ... that's really all I can offer to this thread..

@nethlem: Man that is quite an in depth answer! To be perfectly honest I got halfway through the book before I started to lose interest and decide I'll watch the movie instead. It doesn't seem like the best writing, but the movie seems to have pretty good talent driving it.

@flashflood_29: When she's finished the two of you could give the movie a try, I really enjoyed it and I'm usually very picky about that kind of stuff. It's pretty good at surprising the viewer by doing unexpected things.

@humanity: Yeah, I was surprised myself at how well all of that fit together and is backed by actual science. I mostly came up with that when a guy on IMDb claimed that the movie is unrealistic because everything on the planet would die to the radiation from all the failing nuclear reactors around the world. That made me remember those Chernobyl fungi and after looking them up again I found the melanin connection.

That made me appreciate the movie even more than I already did. I think it's a beautiful take on "what makes us actually human?" with a very strong anti-Racist message of "It's not our biology/race that defines us as humans, it's our shared values". I agree that the writing feels a bit rough in some places and some of the CGI gun squibs on the "hungries" looked a bit cheap, but overall I didn't notice any glaring plot errors or any major stupid behavior of the characters, which is a rather rare thing for me.

Btw: Is the child in the book also named Melanie or is that another thing they changed for the movie?

The best videogame movies are the ones that aren't actually based on videogames. Crank is a excellent GTA movie and Crank 2 is an excellent Saints Row movie.

I really enjoyed the audio book.