Waste of time

Touches You

Good movie but grossly overrated

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

DESCENDENTS is a cheap Chilean post-apocalypse movie in which the central character is a bland little girl who wanders around having lost her parents. The film was apparently shot on the ultra-cheap and in just ten days, which gives some indication as to the reasons why it feels so rushed and amateurish.I don't mind cheap films if they have good stories, because after all good stories cost nothing. However, this one doesn't. The main character is dull beyond belief and attempts to turn this into a zombie movie fall flat time and time again with ridiculous overacting extras. To disguise the paucity of his film, the director includes lots of camera effects, alongside filters, flashbacks, and plenty more in an attempt to distract the viewer, but needless to say I saw straight through all that. In the end, DESCENDENTS has nothing to say of any note.

We "soft-hearted" Yanks will supposedly be drawn to anything with a kid or kids in it, as Chilean writer/director Jorge Olguin presumably knows. In "Descendents" his characters mostly speak accented English, so I gather he had his eye on the American market. His protagonist, Camille, born after the outbreak of (yet another) mysterious disease turning humans into crazed zombie-like creatures, has the telltale marks on her neck indicating she's immune to the killer bug. Most of the (relatively short) running time is about her wandering around either alone or with similar genetically fortunate kids trying to reach the ocean, where there is supposedly a boat and/or a friendly giant octopus waiting. (The kids keep their necks covered, presumably to hide the marks, although it's pretty clear they're immune since they're not coughing up blood and trying to eat people.) There are also a lot of flashbacks with Camille's now dead mother, which at first tug at the heart strings somewhat, but after a while I started to get the flashbacks confused with the present day scenes; they're all shot with that currently popular bleached out virtual black and white look that I guess is meant to give the proceedings a "documentary" aura. To borrow a term from the late Roger Ebert, we also have the "semi obligatory" cold blooded soldiers blasting away at anything that moves. (Come to think of it, "28 Days Later..." has an awful lot to answer for. Could Danny Boyle have had any idea he was writing the new rules for zombie fare?) Camille Lynch as Camille is stoic and completely believable as a kind of Alice in Horrorland, and the other kids are good too, although it's hard to keep track of who they all are. The adult actors are all competent. The settings and effects are impressive, especially on such a low budget. But I hesitate to give it the Ebertian thumb up, if only because there's really nothing here that hasn't been seen before (see above re Danny Boyle). I did like the opening using Camille's drawings to illustrate the violent demise of humanity, but at the end Mr. Olguin suddenly tries to insert an element of "magic realism," which in the South American context seems to mean "any goofy thing that strikes the writer's or director's fancy." Here it just seems bizarre after the preceding bleak real realism. But it is what it is. Compare this with Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" for a much more holistic vision of a child caught up in a real-life adult nightmare seamlessly intertwined with the fantasy element, ultimately more credible and thus more heartbreaking for all the dark whimsy.

I'm a huge fan of post-apocalyptic/zombie films so I figured this would be right up my alley. I may have misjudged...So the film is basically an hour and thirteen minutes of watching a young girl walk through various desolate scenes devoid of any emotion. I can't say she's a bad actor because really at no point does she need to act. As long as she kept walking, the crew kept filming.It's visually very boring on the eyes. They tried this Schindler's List/Sin City effect where mostly ever shot has a low saturation making it nearly black and white EXCEPT for blood which is vividly bright red. And it would "splatter" on the camera in every action scene much like a video game from 10 years ago. For some reason, I'm now craving cherry Kool-Aid.The film is riddled with flashbacks that you're forced to witness multiple times for lengthy durations, while not really contributing to any story or character development. It's not very endearing...The blood and zombie special effects were tolerable but as you'll learn, the zombies are no threat to the main character therefore there is no real terror as a viewer either. I watched this by myself in the dark with headphones on and never once was frightened to any degree.I must say that the opening sequence was the best part of the film. It was creative and had a unique charm to it. As sudden as it came, the charm was gone. On the flip side, the ending credits were pretty cool too.Overall, this really isn't worth your time but it is a relatively short film so be my guest. Just remember that you have been warned. If you do have the patience to get through the entire movie, I must inform you that there is one last scene after the credits, which unsuccessfully tries to give you the back story of how the world came to be. Enjoy! -- 4/10 --

Beyond Geroge Romero there has not been a zombie film that's loaded with this much social/political commentary. Jorge Olguin's 2002 follow-up to SANGRE ETERNA aka ETERNAL BLOOD is a very strong and original post-apocalyptic/Sci-fi/horror movie. For about a half a million dollars, the movie was shot in ten days, with mostly young children ranging from five to ten years old. The children's acting may not be up to par and some of the effects surely reflect the lack of budget & time but DESCENDENTS/SOLOS is a truly dark and disturbing movie set in a dystopian world that looks like a low budget mixture of 28 DAYS LATER and CHILDREN OF MEN, with strong echoes to Chile's past as a military dictatorship. Jorge Olguin is a talent to definitely keep an eye on.