YMMV / The Girl With All the Gifts

• Broken Aesop: In the movie. The moral of the story is that everybody has a right to live and no one person can claim the right to take someone's life for their own sake. This is all well and good, except in the end, Melanie deliberately commits genocide against the human race so her kind can survive and inherit the Earth.
• Genius Bonus: The armored truck used by soldiers is Reynolds Boughton RB44. It has well-earned and infamous reputation of constantly breaking down for just about any reason or no reason at all and having zero durability for a 4x4 military truck. Thus their drive getting incapacitated so easily makes perfect sense. Also, the truck got decomissioned pretty quick, so it further highlights how desperate the soldiers are to use what is basically an extremely unreliable museum piece.
• Inferred Holocaust: By releasing the spores in the air, Melanie not only caused infection of all humans left, but also doomed the possible offspring of hungries - which is already a rare occurence - into living in a feral state, as there is only one known human teacher left in the entire world and she's in London. Not to mention Miss Justineau will run out of supplies sooner or later, if not just eat a bullet due to depression and Cabin Fever.
  • The extinction of humanity was actually implied from the moment the fungus's mature form was revealed. Even without Melanie's intervention, it was inevitable that a chance fire or storm would have triggered the spores' release from some cluster of sporangia.
    • Mitigated in The Boy on the Bridge, which reveals that at least one human colony in the mountains has survived, and Melanie sends Ms. Justineau to live with them after she's finished teaching enough of the new generation.
  • The fact that the second-generation infected children devoured their mothers' organs to eat their way out of the womb implies that even the children may be doomed to extinction: if subsequent fungal-symbiote offspring are "born" in the same gruesome way, then no infected girl who grows up to become a mother will survive to produce a second child, and each generation will, at most, be half the size of the previous one.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The Girl With All The Gifts may as well be the novelization of The Last of Us, only with the setting transplanted to England. Both are stories about a Zombie Apocalypse caused by a fungus in the cordyceps genus jumping to humans, in which a young girl who is immune to the fungus and lives in a symbiotic relationship with it is being transported across a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with zombies and human bandits to a safe zone where scientists will likely slice her brain open to study her immunity. Two of Melanie's protectors in The Girl With All the Gifts, Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks, each correspond to different aspects of the protagonist Joel's personality in The Last of Us, with Justineau being the loving, adoptive parental figure and Parks being the badass killer who develops a grudging respect for Melanie.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Last of Us but also 28 Days Later, sharing countless common elements fitting for each of those settings.

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