This is Not a Test review
Teens try to survive a zombie outbreak in a story that never figures out what it wants to say.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
This is Not a Test
Directed by Adam MacDonald
Written by Adam MacDonald
Starring Olivia Holt, Froy Gutierrez, Corteon Moore, Carson MacCormac, Chloe Avakian, Luke MacFarlane and Missy Peregrym
This is Not a Test Review
It’s pretty poor timing for This is Not a Test to arrive so soon after 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The latter features some of the most interesting ideas in the zombie movie realm in a long while. The former doesn’t appear to have anything in particular to say. About anything. It’s been a while since I can remember seeing a zombie movie that had no commentary whatsoever. On one hand…that could be viewed as refreshing. The problem with This is Not a Test is that it seems like it wants to say something about…something…it’s just completely incapable of doing so.
A zombie outbreak ravages a small town and leads to a group of teens barricading themselves inside their empty school. Get your jokes about The Breakfast Club out of the way now. Yes, a group of teens from different backgrounds are trapped at school on a non-school day. That’s where the similarities end. The Breakfast Club famously showed character growth throughout its story. In fact, it’s the entire point of the movie. This is Not a Test missed that memo. Which is strange given it really hammers home the backstory of its lead character Sloane (Olivia Holt). We know all about her abusive father…her sister leaving her behind in that troubled home…and none of it ultimately means a damned thing.
A bigger concern is that This is Not a Test seems to think that it does. When we meet Sloane she’s on the verge of suicide. If you think that her arc will be about her finding the will to survive amidst the chaos of death…you’d be wrong. But the movie thinks you’d be right. It thinks that it’s telling that story…but it doesn’t have any of the necessary beats. Whether Sloane wants to live by the end of This is Not a Test has practically nothing to do with what happens in the story itself. She mostly sits around looking sad…worried about her sister…and eventually wanting to get home to find her. But nothing happens to earn an arc that ends with wanting to live. This is Not a Test strangely seems to think that it does.
It’s not the only issue. While we spend most of the movie locked in the school with our five main characters…the story bounces around to different times before we get into that. At one point there is a flashback inside of a scene that begins by telling us it’s taking place in the past. Then it bounces back…and then back again. There’s no narrative reason for this. It feels like they just didn’t want to cut some scenes and also didn’t know how to present them. Ok…that’s not entirely fair. There is one narrative reason for some of these things…but at an already long feeling hour and forty-two minutes…there was probably a more elegant way to hit these points.
We bounce from Sloane and her sister before the outbreak to Sloane and her new gang of misfits during the outbreak…back to Sloane right before she met the gang…forward to the gang’s initial attempt to hideout in a house…back to more family flashbacks…and ultimately to the school setting where we started that loop to begin with. It’s…something. And it doesn’t happen again. So that was just how they chose to edit together act one.
When things finally settle down…they settle into a lull. Scenes pass without anything to say about much of anything. There are conflicts and love interests and a potentially infected intruder. It all unfolds at a pace that will have you clamoring for the return of the scattershot time jumps that comprise the first act. Things happen in This is Not a Test…but they rarely seem to happen for any particular reason. Now…I want to stress that I don’t hate that concept on paper. An apocalypse upending people’s plans and finding a group of fellow survivors to make the best of it with isn’t a bad plan. But it isn’t what This is Not a Test does. It doesn’t really do anything.
The best way I can describe This is Not a Test would be to imagine a corkboard full of scene ideas for a young adult zombie story written on 3×5 cards. Now imagine that those cards were what they used to shoot the movie…without figuring out how to get from one to the other…and with no care for an overall theme or point. Also, imagine someone dropped the first 25% of those cards so they weren’t in order anymore. Then they shot them that way anyway. And it somehow ended up more interesting than the ones they left in order. That’s This is Not a Test.
It’s not all bad, of course. There are some decent gore effects and mostly fine performances. You have to give the cast credit for putting anything interesting on film given how pointless their roles in the movie ultimately end up being. This is Not a Test is based on a popular YA novel from 2012. It’s been described as “The Breakfast Club meets George Romero.” If only the people who made this adaptation understood either of those things before they rolled camera.
Scare Value
This is Not a Test is a weird watch. It feels like a collection of half-baked ideas instead of a story driven by any particular purpose. There’s nothing to take away from it…no character arcs that have anything to say…no reason for much of anything that happens. Which can be fine in a story where the apocalypse upends everyone’s plans. But This is Not a Test sets up the start of arcs it has no real interest in paying off later. It’s just kind of there.
2/5
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