Dan Reilly

+2 clout

Sep 2, 2026

I put Zoo on because it was a short word and I had a leftover hour, and then the German planes showed up over Belfast and I did not pause it. 1941. The zoo. A baby elephant named Buster who looks like he wandered in from a picture book. Tom Hall is the vet's kid — Art Parkinson, the one who was Rickon if you still have that in your head — and he has that face kids had in war movies before they learned to act "trauma." He loves the elephant immediately. I did too. I'm not proud of how fast. They decide the animals have to be put down because the bombs are coming and a panicking elephant in a city is a problem somebody wrote on a clipboard. Tom and his little gang of street friends steal Buster. They hide him in a widow's backyard. Penelope Wilton is the widow, Denise, and she looks at that elephant the way some people look at a second chance they did not ask for. Toby Jones is a security guard named Charlie who I kept waiting to be the villain. He isn't, not really. He's just a man with a job and a key ring. There's no theme song. That's the part that got me. It's quiet in the way a city is quiet between raids, and then it isn't. The Blitz is not a history lesson. It's the thing that makes hiding an elephant behind a terrace house seem reasonable. I sat there thinking about my own kid-memory of zoos, the smell, the stupid excitement of a big animal that shouldn't be that close, and then a siren would go and I'd remember this is a war film pretending it's a kids' film, which is how kids actually lived it. I kept waiting for the lecture. It never comes. The kids are just kids. The widow does a brave thing without a speech about smashing anything. Nobody swaps the elephant for a metaphor. The Germans are the ones dropping the bombs, which is, you know, what happened. Denise Weston Austin was a real woman they called the Elephant Angel, and the movie sands that true part into a shape that will play at 7pm, but the dirt in the yard still looks like dirt. Wilton doesn't play cute. She plays tired and then she plays stubborn. Parkinson is earnest without the shine. The backyard is too small for an elephant and that's the joke and the terror at the same time. I believed the mud. Some of the kid dialogue is the writers remembering childhood instead of being in it, and a couple raid shots have that "we had a budget for fire" look. I groaned once, out loud, when a line landed like a pamphlet. Then Buster flapped an ear and I shut up. It's not a great war movie. It's a good-enough one that remembered the animals. I finished it, thought about an elephant in a Belfast yard, and did not feel scolded. I told my wife there was an elephant in it so she would sit down. She did. That's rarer than it should be.

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Dan Reilly
+2 clout
Sep 2, 2026
I put Zoo on because it was a short word and I had a leftover hour, and then the German planes showed up over Belfast and I did not pause it. 1941. The zoo. A baby elephant named Buster who looks like he wandered in from a picture book. Tom Hall is the vet's kid — Art Parkinson, the one who was Rickon if you still have that in your head — and he has that face kids had in war movies before they learned to act "trauma." He loves the elephant immediately. I did too. I'm not proud of how fast. They decide the animals have to be put down because the bombs are coming and a panicking elephant in a city is a problem somebody wrote on a clipboard. Tom and his little gang of street friends steal Buster. They hide him in a widow's backyard. Penelope Wilton is the widow, Denise, and she looks at that elephant the way some people look at a second chance they did not ask for. Toby Jones is a security guard named Charlie who I kept waiting to be the villain. He isn't, not really. He's just a man with a job and a key ring. There's no theme song. That's the part that got me. It's quiet in the way a city is quiet between raids, and then it isn't. The Blitz is not a history lesson. It's the thing that makes hiding an elephant behind a terrace house seem reasonable. I sat there thinking about my own kid-memory of zoos, the smell, the stupid excitement of a big animal that shouldn't be that close, and then a siren would go and I'd remember this is a war film pretending it's a kids' film, which is how kids actually lived it. I kept waiting for the lecture. It never comes. The kids are just kids. The widow does a brave thing without a speech about smashing anything. Nobody swaps the elephant for a metaphor. The Germans are the ones dropping the bombs, which is, you know, what happened. Denise Weston Austin was a real woman they called the Elephant Angel, and the movie sands that true part into a shape that will play at 7pm, but the dirt in the yard still looks like dirt. Wilton doesn't play cute. She plays tired and then she plays stubborn. Parkinson is earnest without the shine. The backyard is too small for an elephant and that's the joke and the terror at the same time. I believed the mud. Some of the kid dialogue is the writers remembering childhood instead of being in it, and a couple raid shots have that "we had a budget for fire" look. I groaned once, out loud, when a line landed like a pamphlet. Then Buster flapped an ear and I shut up. It's not a great war movie. It's a good-enough one that remembered the animals. I finished it, thought about an elephant in a Belfast yard, and did not feel scolded. I told my wife there was an elephant in it so she would sit down. She did. That's rarer than it should be.
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