Anna and the Apocalypse

Watching Anna and the Apocalypse reminded me of the concept of elevator pitches. The whole idea of an elevator pitch is "describe a movie in the duration of an elevator ride". Like a lot of things grabbed onto by popular culture, though, the idea of an elevator pitch isn't to SOLELY reduce a movie down to its most base components -- "Die Hard on a boat" or "Hand That Rocks The Cradle, but with a babysitter" -- but to also provide enough of an intriguing hook that the person being pitched invites the pitcher to tell them more. An elevator pitch is meant to be bait, not the whole fish. Anna and the Apocalypse is what happens when the person making the elevator pitch confuses the bait for fish. Someone said "what if High School Musical had a zombie outbreak?", and stopped there, and nobody seemed to say "... AND?". Cards on the table here, musicals are probably my least favorite movie genre. That's not to say there aren't ones I can enjoy -- I agree with Roger Ebert that writing off an entire genre is dressing up ignorance as taste -- but the conventions of the genre make it difficult for me to get into it overall, for a variety of reasons. But I went into Anna thinking, hoping, that this blend of comedy, horror, and music would result in something clever, that the musical aspect would be done with a wink and a nod to the absurdity of it all. I just naturally assumed that was the intent. Instead, I was shocked to see exactly what I mentioned at the outset: High School Musical with zombies. Anna is like one of those lunchroom trays with the raised partitions that keep the food separate, only in this case, the writing keeps all the elements of this movie separate. Anna and the Apocalypse is a comedy, a musical, and a zombie outbreak horror movie, but it is not a horror-comedy-musical. Occasionally the horror and comedy cross paths, but the musical aspect? There is ZERO attempt at having it feel organic to the movie. Every time a musical number breaks out, not only does the movie grind to a halt to allow it to happen, there is no attempt at making the music tonally consistent to the moment. A perfect example is the duet between Anna and the headmaster towards the end, which is this up-beat, triumphant, bouncy little number, in the middle of her fighting through a cafeteria of zombies while he carries on like a dollar store Bond villain clone. I want to stress that this isn't me not liking the idea of putting music into a movie like this; I wanted this to succeed. I wanted to enjoy it. But at every turn, I felt like the movie was willfully made without considering how to blend these ingredients together effectively. Had this been done as a satire of High School Musical, it could've worked. But the musical numbers are delivered without a shred of self-awareness, making them feel anachronistic to the movie they're in, or vice versa. Compounding the problem with the music is that the creators of this movie seem to think the music is a shortcut to character development. Now, music on its own is a tell-not-show medium. Can't avoid it when the entire medium is built around singing. But there's a way to use it in a movie and there's a way to abuse it, and this falls into the latter. For instance, My Fair Lady has a sequence where Rex Harrison is teaching Aubrey Hepburn proper diction, and it ends up segueing s into the "Rain In Spain" song. This isn't her entire transformation from rough and tumble Cockney flower girl to upper society lady. It isn't even the apex. It's the first step, when she finally learns how to refine her accent. There's character development portrayed within the song, but there's plenty of further character development done outside the music. AatA doesn't even try to do that. Everything you learn about the characters is done through the songs, meaning the viewer is told, not shown. It's one thing to use songs to amplify or augment the narrative, but it is quite another, and not a good thing, when the songs are the ONLY vector for character development. Music is not a cheat code, but I felt like that's how it was being used here. And that brings me to the other big failure I found in AatA: the characters. I just didn't care about any of them, because the movie didn't give me a reason to care. Sitting here right now, less than 24 hours after having seen it, I can tell you the title character's Anna, and she wants to travel after graduation. I think her best friend is Joe or John? They have a female friend with short blonde hair, and all I know of her is she's American and lesbian. There's easily another half dozen characters in the movie, and I don't know the names or characteristics of any of them. Nobody has an arc, nobody grows or changes, and nobody is defined enough to resonate emotionally in any way. Outside of Anna and the headmaster, the cast were all as faceless and useless as the zombies. I will give credit to Ella Hunt as Anna for an energetic performance. I don't care if I ever see more of this movie, but I'd love to see more of her. She has a natural sweetness and sass to her that's easy to love. And I'd be lying if I didn't say that, when the movie does full blown dance numbers, they're choreographed well. And the cast are decent singers. Nobody I'm gonna rush out and buy an album of, but they can carry a tune that's easy to listen to. And I'd be remiss if I didn't commend the gore in the movie. For all of its other elements, it isn't afraid to have some fun with the gore and some creative zombie kills, but it also doesn't go overboard with them. This shouldn't be Dawn Of The Dead levels of viscera, but doesn't shy away from getting nasty when it needs to. So, even though the genres don't adequately blend here, the individual components are executed well in isolation. The overall, though, comes down to that problem: everything done well is done in isolation. The genres feel like they're running parallel and occasionally cutting each other off, and the overall idea wasn't taken past that initial "this plus that" pitch. I could see the love that went into this and where they drew inspiration from -- movies like Shaun Of The Dead, Rocky Horror, and even The Breakfast Club. They had a recipe for success, but they didn't actually put the ingredients together, leaving the movie feeling unfinished and trying to get by on whimsy and charm. It thinks the elevator pitch is the whole concept. It's not enough.