Daisy Ridley | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new movie “We Bury the Dead”, has a logline on IMDB that reads: “After a catastrophic military disaster, the dead don’t just rise – they hunt. Ava searches for her missing husband, but what she finds is far more terrifying.”

This movie will likely rank as one of the most boring and innocuous zombie movies of all time. Yes, this is yet another zombie movie; however, this one has an amazingly low count of violent zombie scenes or any zombie scenes, after a woman, Ava, played by Daisy Ridley, arrives in New Zealand, the site of this military accident, and tries to find her husband Mitch, played by Matt Whelan with the help of another man, Clay, played by Brenton Thwaites.

The rest of this film is nothing more than an unexpectedly long and boring trek with Ava and Clay through New Zealand to travel 300 miles south to the site of the resort where Ava’s husband was staying. The majority of the victims of this military accident are dead, but a small percentage of the victims become alive and, for reasons unknown, cause only very minor incidents as Clay and Ava travel south. I remember wondering at the time, is this a zombie movie or a travelogue of New Zealand? Also, this movie is so boring it was hard to believe this could ever be considered an action movie, or even a drama.

The high Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this bad movie are 84%, which is as crazy as this bad zombie movie. The audience rating is a more accurate 49%. Before it’s too late, the producer should change the title from “We Bury the Dead” to “We Bury this Movie”. This one is a huge miss and receives a 10% rating.

The new movie Young Woman and the Sea is another great historical movie about an important person and event that most people have never heard about.

Trudy Ederle was the first woman to swim across the English Channel, on August 6, 1926 – an extreme athletic achievement that over the last 100 years has killed 10 people. The distance between France and England is 21 miles, with an ocean that has severe waves, jellyfish, sharks, and in some areas unexploded mines from previous wars that were never removed. There are ocean shallows that are near the England coast where boats cannot follow the swimmer and in the case of this story, the swimmer can get lost very easily and drown. This dangerous problem of the ocean shallows near the coast of England provides an impressive emotional ending to this very good story.

This film stars Daisy Ridley as Trudy and follows her very unlikely life as the daughter of a butcher from Manhattan. Trudy’s interest in swimming came after a horrific boat accident in New York Harbor that burned and sank. 847 people died, most of them because they never learned how to swim. As Trudy’s interest in swimming grew she had to endure years of resistance from her father, and chauvinism because she was a female who wanted to swim in competition.

At age 19, in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Ederle won a gold medal as one of the members of 4×100 meter freestyle relay. Soon after she announced to her family that she wanted to swim the English Channel and unfortunately her coach for her first attempt sabotaged her swim, by giving her tea that made her sleep. Why he was not prosecuted for this, was never explained in this movie.

At the end of this film, it was mentioned – in the history of ticker tape parades in New York City, the one thrown for Ederle in 1926 still stands as the largest in history after she swam the English Channel.

Overall the acting in this film was outstanding, and like the recent “Nyad” starring Annette Benning – anyone seeing this movie has to admire what it took these actors to swim in the ocean to film these two impressive real-life stories.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a high 84% with my rating 90% and a solid recommendation.