Thursday Movie Picks: Characters Making a New Start

Thursday Movie Picks is a weekly event hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Head over to her site and join in! This week’s theme is about characters making a new start. I’m not actually sure how to interpret this – should it be about movies where the character is already doing that part in the beginning, or how it ends is where the character makes a new start. I’m going with a beginning, middle, and end for this theme. Here are my picks for the week.

Paddington – The titular character makes his new start in London, when his aunt boarded him on a boat heading to London after a devastating event destroyed their home in the forest. He was taken in by the Browns who find him in the train station, and Paddington’s further adventures start from there.

Room – The new start takes place in the middle of the movie, when Ma and Jack gets reunited with her family, and adjustments had to be made. Life has moved on, and it was a difficult beginning for both of them. While both were trying to get used to the outside world, their reception of their new environment was different for both mother and child.

The Girl With All The Gifts – Like Room, two characters also make a new start, but with different results. In the final scene, we see Miss Justineau teach zombie children from the vicinity of the medical bunker that she’s kept in. She is the last non-zombie person alive, and it’s a sad reality for her because she’s kept in isolation for the rest of her life.  Her student, Melanie, is now free with other highly functional zombie children who are taught how to read and write every day. In a sense, they’re still doing what they both love (teaching and learning), but in an entirely different setting and circumstances. It’s hard to talk about this specifically without talking about the entire movie, but the ending does make sense for this theme if you’ve seen the film.