REVIEW - HOW I LIVE NOW

or: How I Wish I Lived Now. You can feel the romance bulging through the thin film of quasi-political drama that How I Live Now constructs for the sake of intellectual capital. That romance is this movie's raison d'etre, yet it has more profound aspirations... at least, it supposes so. But though their profundity may be in question, their success is not. Kevin MacDonald mounts a spirited, engaging family drama with the mildly abrasive, and very welcome, edge of apocalyptic thriller hovering overhead, always just out of sight, not always out of mind. Lame predictability also hovers over, though less potently, in the form of the romance between Saoirse Ronan and George Mackay; it's a source of enormous puzzlement why this is the angle MacDonald pursues as the story veers onto different, more urgent narrative pathways, as it lacks in verve, even if it makes sense for the characters. Essentially, How I Live Now is a Young Adult adaptation - its comparatively grittier content (profanity, sex etc.) of little effect - and its principal demands lie in delivering the goods for its core fanbase. They'll take the genre conventions as moot, and may either be stimulated by the more serious trappings, or be bored by them. Certainly, into the movie's second half, I grew quite bored, as the cross-country trek is the least-deftly-handled plot cliche in the film, without significant dramatic drive nor sense of danger or despair. Early scenes establish a sense that there could be something to lose for these folk. Later ones are beset by inertia, thus eroding that sense, and replacing it with banality.