Never Let Me Go

Posted on May 25, 2009 | by admin

Genre: Sci-Fi Drama
Premise: A trio growing up in a boarding school discover they are clones grown for the sole purpose of organ donation.
About: Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) directs Keira Knightly in this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. Garland wrote The Beach, 28 Days Later, and Sunshine. So if you liked any of those scripts, this might interest you.
Writer: Alex Garland

Never Let Me Go is a moving tale about a group of individuals who discover they will only live 1/3 of the life the rest of us do. The premise itself is unimpressive. Organ harvesting storylines dominated the headlines in the late 90s/early 2000s, culminating in the criminally bad Michael Bay directed sci-fi flick “The Island” – which curiously didn’t have anything to do with an island. But it’s the way the subject matter’s addressed here that ultimately saves the script.

A group of friends attend a boarding school that treats its inhabitants like royalty except for a few rules. Anger is discouraged. Diet is strict. And life is ordered. There’s an odd haunting quality about the place, as if we’re living in the world’s most beautiful coffin. Which, for all intents and purposes, we are.

Ruth and Kathy are frenimies. Ruth is the pretty one. She gets all the attention from the boys. And Kathy is the bookish introspective one (who will be played by Knightley when she’s older). Tommy, the third member of this group, is a handsome boy with anger issues. We observe this complicated relationship as it evolves over the course of their stay at the school. Kathy confides in Ruth that she likes Tommy and it’s clear that Ruth is jealous of their connection. So what does Ruth do? What any good frenimy would do. She asks Tommy out. The two, who couldn’t be more wrong for each other, begin a long relationship, fueled by Ruth’s desire to keep Kathy away from Tommy.

There aren’t a lot of twists and turns in Never Let Me Go. The kids are told of their fate early on. Their organs will be harvested, one or two at a time, and after the third harvesting, somewhere in their 20s, they will die. But they’re taught that it’s their duty. So while under normal circumstances you’d expect anger or resentment. There is none of that here. Only acceptance.

After school, the organ-crew is allowed out into the real world, and our dysfunctional trio separates, only to meet up again in their early 20s, with Ruth near death, Tommy two donations down, and Kathy still yet to have her first donation. The three try to make up for past mistakes but find that it might be too late.

What was unclear to me is if this was happening in the future or if it was happening in some sort of alternate history. The harvesting is so frank, so non-secretive, that I figured we had to be in a hell of a far-off future. Yet the story had a very contemporary feel to it – so it was difficult to figure out just where we were. I was curious as to why a world would allow something like this to happen. Would a country like England really be okay with killing people for organs?

Never Let Me Go poses some interesting questions. The idea that these people know they’re only living a portion of a life and are okay with that is the big one. But while we feel sorry for them, they don’t feel sorry for themselves. And it’s that fearless approach that keeps this from spiraling into Depressingville. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still dark stuff. It’s just a unique way to approach the material. For that reason, it’s worth checking out.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the most tried and true formulas in storytelling is the love triangle. It can be used in any genre and as long as you make each of the individual characters compelling, it almost always works.

Posted in Drama, Sci-Fi, Worth The Read

http://www.blogger.com/profile/04499773796473787733 Chris

organ harvesting stories actually date back to the 70s, when Michael Crichton wrote “Coma” and it was a hit film starring Michael Douglas
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08439555051697115476 Carson Reeves

Ah, I remember the cover for that book. One of the spookiest book covers I’ve ever seen.
Aaron_C

Damnit, another cloning script.
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08439555051697115476 Carson Reeves

Haha. This isn’t anything like yours.
Anonymous

the book was really really good!!! it sounds like they trimmed it down considerably (as expected in a film).
Anonymous

in the book, though, they kept it a bit of a mystery as to what the children were being sheltered from or what the purpose of thise secluded school was. when the kids spoke of their aspirations their teachers would just look at them, reluctantly indulging their dreams of having normal lives. i think that deepened sense of tragedy, that they won’t be able to live their lives to the fullest as it doesn’t belong to them may be gone if they tell the students from the beginning that they’re organ hosts.
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08439555051697115476 Carson Reeves

They have a little of that here, but still let us in on the secret pretty early.

Japanese authors tend to have a haunting quality about their writing, and this doesn’t sound any different. Murakami is of course the master of this. I wonder if they’ll ever make one of his books into a film.
Anonymous

“Japanese authors tend to have a haunting quality about their writing, and this doesn’t sound any different.”

Ishiguro was raised and educated in England, so he’s not exactly a Japanese writer in the sense that you meant, yet I think you’re spot-on about his writing style. It’s somehow very Japanese still.

You’re also correct about the time period. It’s not supposed to be thought of as futuristic, but rather as taking place in an alternate world/bizarro England.
Anonymous

JJ:

Sigh…one of those genre plots/metaphors (we’re really clones! We symbolize the crushing anonymity of the modern industrial world!) that feels like it’s been done to death even if it hasn’t really. Still, after The Island, The Clonus Horror, Blade Runner, and THX 1138, this’ll have to have some really intriguing new angle…

Alex Garland is an excellent writer, though, and just seeing his take on the idea makes it interesting for me. I mean, he made an interesting script out of Halo, for crying out loud, a video game consisting of shooting aliens with a machine gun. I think here he’s got a bit more to work with. Well, gonna give it a look…
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08239067667651048280 Joshua James

Coma was actually based on a book by Robin Cook … Crichton didn’t write it, he directed the film.
http://screenterrier.blogspot.com ScreenTerrier

Keira Knightley will be playing the adult Ruth, not Kathy…
Anonymous

It’s true, Kathy is going to played by Carey Mulligan, who was great in ‘An Education.’
Anonymous

JJ Says:

Yeah, I thought it was odd that Keira Knightley wasn’t playing “the pretty one”…it’s too bad, though, it would’ve been cool to cast her against type!
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08439555051697115476 Carson Reeves

Oops, shoulda double checked that one. I’m surprised, since this is a small movie and Ruth isn’t the lead role.
Planet

Carson, this is one of your weaker reviews. You mostly regurgitate the plot and only offer a paragraph of critique. I don’t really understand why you thought this was only “worth the read”. Not much meet on this review. What’s up? Is it a time thing?
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08439555051697115476 Carson Reeves

Hey Planet,

Yeah, the length of the review has a lot to do with time and how passionate (good or bad) I was about the script. This was a combination of not having a lot of time and a script I thought was good, but didn’t necessarily evoke much passion from me.

Also, for the next couple of months, I’m judging a screenplay competition. So the reviews will probably be shorter in general. I’m going to do my best though. I’m trying.

Carson
http://www.blogger.com/profile/06872780969179149381 martinb

It is their absolute acceptance that makes this story so strange. When the guardian reveals they’ll have short lives, you’d expect a prison riot, but… nothing. The guardian disappears. And the mysterious Madame and her Gallery. What is their purpose?

Although it’s only 87 pages, I thought it a trifle long. It needs a bit more meat. I would have liked something about how they are financed and fed, and how outsiders like tradesmen or children react to them.

The quiet, wintry tone is well sustained throughout. It poses an interesting question — what is the inner life of clones? And although we don’t get an answer, we get some sort of insight.

Might do reasonably well on the art house circuit.
Shupup

Why this very Screenwriting 101 need to be told exactly when the story is set? Clearly this script–like the book–is aiming at something timeless and mythic. The rules of the world are established clearly. And an opening title card indicating “The Year 2032″ wouldn’t have changed a goddamned thing.
http://www.blogger.com/profile/08439555051697115476 Carson Reeves

I’m not sure it would’ve either. But I think there’s a natural tendency for an audience to want to know when/where they are when watching a film – and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

Martin, I agree. There’s a sub-plot or a more fleshed out story missing here. The page count was quite surprising.
[thiago]

martin is right. it needs more meat. but overall, i guess the technical aspects of alex garland’s writing really shine through. he uses very brief descriptions and elicites a lot of mood from the settings, scenes and character’s relations with each other, only here and there adding a more poetic description. i liked his (if i may call it) style very much.

judging from a few set pics and interesting visual clues on mark romanek’s twitter, they are going with a “timeless/england on the 60´s” vibe. at least this is what i got from it.

hope they put this through revisions and make a great film out of it.
Anonymous

JJ says

Man, I REALLY liked this. Simply as a script, this is maybe the best one I’ve read in the past couple of months. It’s written in such a sparse, poetic and ultimatly very seductive and moving way. It does something that’s rare in genre stories, and hard to pull off, but when it’s done right, can be very powerful: it backgrounds the genre elements (cloning, the hows and whys of this alternate world England, the organization of the schools, ect) and foregrounds the character’s emotions and interaction. Kind’ve like ALIEN, which may have been the pioneer of this kind of thing: in the first film in that series we never found out how the Nostromo worked, what “Antartica Traffic Control” was, how the androids were built, ect, the characters just treated it all very matter of factly: same thing here.

All in all, the poetic style, the voiceover, the strict adherance to the character’s pov where we only learn what they would know, the childhood scenes, and the environment of the story all reminded me of both Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN and some of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman’s early stories. Good luck to this filmmakers, this has great potential.

(Oh, and something about the love triangle and how it played out vaugely recalled Henry James “The Wings Of The Dove” too…)
Carson

JJ, glad you enjoyed it.
Anonymous

“What was unclear to me is if this was happening in the future or if it was happening in some sort of alternate history.”

Alternate history. The novel is set in the 1990s. Cloning and organ harvesting began after World War II. I thought the book was actually pretty clear about that, especially when Miss Emily tells them about the history of Hailsham near the end.

KH
Anonymous

where is the link?
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