The Park

After a mysterious virus kills all adults, society is left to the only survivors… children, feral, angry, and living on borrowed time.

The Park takes place in a world where a virus has killed all of the adults, leaving nothing but children. Even worse, once puberty hits, and the kids become adults, the virus comes back and kills you.

It’s Mad Max meets Bugsy Malone, but sadly… not a musical.

Ines and Bui are a pair of cherubic killer nomads. They are a pair of bandits and generally murderous ne’er-do-wells supposedly searching for a cure to the virus that destroyed their world, but that mostly feels like something inserted into the script because someone erroneously believed they needed to explain why the pair are out wandering around in the first place. Kuan lives in a rundown amusement park she's trying to fix, and is a cross between a precocious kid playing Annie in a school play, and a precocious kid playing Willy Wonka in a school play. When the trio meet, the soon-to-be new friends fight a bit, work together a bit, then fight some more, then other bandits show up, forcing them to work together a bit more, leading them all to learn some valuable lessons about each other… and themselves.

The whole thing feels like it would’ve been better off as the beginning prologue of a tv show or a comicbook.

I usually don’t find a lot of narrative value in the puberty apocalypse idea. All it ever means is that there’s supposedly this Sword of Damocles hanging overhead, but then when it’s the main characters turn, it gets diffused somehow. This film is no different. I suppose there’s a potential discussion of mortality somewhere in there that might be interesting, but that’s not what they do here, so who cares, and also, it doesn’t seem like that’d be a real fun time at the movies either, right? A bunch of young kids slowly coming to the realization that their deaths are imminent, that they’re nothing but a half-hearted epilogue to the world, the brief spluttering final flare of light before the match that was humanity finally burns out forever?

Eh… pass.

Random aside: the whole “last flare of light before the match burns out” thing was often the main storyline of the Gummy Bear cartoon back in the 80s, and the lonely and inevitable fate of Cubbi Gummi still haunts me to this day. Poor Cubbi, the little liquid meth addicted freak…

Anyway, there’s only two options I can see happening when you use this particular framework for a story… One, as I said, everyone dies. Meh. Two, the characters all end up miraculously “cured” which turns the whole thing into a waste of time. What’s the point? Why bother with such an unnecessarily binding constraint on your story in the first place? Is there nothing else you could’ve tried to say instead of jst imposing a falsely ticking clock?

Second random aside: The Luke Perry tv show Jeremiah (2002-2004) recognized how boring the idea of a Puberty Apocalypse was if it continues to kill at puberty, opting instead to just let the kid survivors grow up without adults after the “Big D” ruined their world and killed their parents. Just fyi, the “D” stands for death, not dick.

In the end, The Park is not a “bad” film per se, but the question of who its intended audience is dominates. It doesn’t go hard enough for adults, and it’s not sweet enough for kids. The tone makes no sense. I can’t tell if it’s cowardly, or if it just has nothing to say. Also, while acknowledging that they’re all kids, the actors are in way over their heads. They truly act their precocious little hearts out, but… no. It doesn’t work at all.

The whole film doesn’t work at all.