This film (and book) were both assigned viewing (and reading) in middle school for me. Surprisingly, for us being so young, we were asked to "compare and contrast" the text and film, and what the choices the filmmaker made might say about the world. If only I'd followed the Financial Times' 1971 review of this film, and chosen to read Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality at 11 instead of at 21 in university, I might have been able to articulate my thoughts more clearly. Despite modern fantasies, there is no human tabula rasa. And the progress of culture has rapidly laid waste to First People's cultures, despite our more recent attempts to preserve it. So yes, we see invented-for-film father rage (rather than plane crash), we see the children struggle, we see the First People boy ravaged by outsider influenza, we ultimately see the girl succumb to subservient modern life. So sure, we see all this at the expense of getting into the heads of Mary, Peter, and the First People boy on his walkabout, without studying their internal monologues. That's fine; film isn't great at that anyway. And a filmmaker who cut his teeth making Fahrenheit 451 is going to want to say things a bit differently, anyway. What strikes me now, thinking back to the film from 2025, is how existentialist and absurdist the message feels. These three children exist in each others' orbits for nearly the entire film, but do they know each other in any meaningful sense? Can they even communicate? Isolation and awkwardness permeate adolesence these days, and focusing on that at the expense of each individual's thoughts is probably for the best. The visuals in the film are stunning; at least as good as its contemporary National Geographic specials, and deeply evocative of that landscape. The allegories may be more heavy handed (if you don't see the Garden of Eden analogies, you may need to watch more closely) but that may just be what an 11 year old needs to follow the message more clearly. Recommended modern pairing for this film: Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade.