MUBI

Total emancipation from oppression in the world lies not in government institutions, nor it’s radical opposition, but rather through redemption for the apathy exercised by otherwise good hearts. The point of view expressed by “Children of Men” is one that truly does cut directly to the core of many of the problems we as a society experience today. A poster on this site stated that Tarkovsky would be proud, and while I’m not sure if that’s necessarily true (he seemed to be impertinent and difficult to please), he along with true filmmaker / philosophers like Kubrick would have at least appreciated the films analyses of the situation presented as a whole, and revealing a balance, rather than picking an extreme side. 5 stars for one of my personal all-time favorites.

Surely one of the strongest movies from the past few years dealing with the new face of facism that is ahead of us; with the supressed problematic of the refugees that will sooner or later become the new “enemy” of the developed Europe. It is an exact, straightforward and truthful display of where a crisis always leads – to totalitarism. The movie also displays some of the same practices now – the scene in the refugee camp with the Guantanamo look-a-like prisoners and the song “Arbeit macht frei” as a clear connection to the nazi concetration camps. It has a big statment. And further more, it is brilliantly shot. The use of the camera is so precise and with its long takes so in the happening that it grabs you and puts you next to Theo. The technique is similar to the movie Bloody Sunday, but at least a level better. It will make you think and it will leave you no hope.

It’s an incredible film, I love it, this is one of the greatest films of 06’, it’s one of the greatest films of this decade, that’s saying a lot, but I absolutely love this film. The Cinematography is amazing, and you care about every single character, even the nd it feels like you are right next to smallest parts you feel for them. People comparing this to Blade Runner is wrong, it is evidently better than Blade Runner. You care about everyone who dies in the film, and you feel like you are right next to Clive Bowen through the entire film. It is one of the greatest films I’ve seen in a long, long, time; Cuaron does a stupendous job, he should have won the best picture of 06’, but of course the 150 year-old’s who run thee Academy didn’t give it to him, which is complete and absolute bullshit, I stopped giving a shit about what the academy had to say after this film being snubbed. To some it up on one word, Great

I just watched this movie for like the 500th time last evening, and each and every time I sit there completely stuck in my seat with my eyes glued to the screen. This movie if phenomenal, and whomever disagrees should burn. Seriously, how did this movie not become a huge blockbuster hit? Each and every detail is orchestrated beautifully and with harmony to the overall story and picture. Clive Owen in this movie is fucking amazing. Nobody could have played that role better than him. Top 3 movies of all time for me.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is absolutely one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Two viewings have overwhelmed me with some of the strongest emotional reactions I’ve ever had to a movie. It is, at the very least, one of the best of 2007 (along with Pan’s Labyrinth and United 93), and everything the similarly-themed V for Vendetta could have been.

The movie opens nearly two decades after the last human birth. Mass infertility is a terrifyingly plausible sci-fi trope in 2008, with looming climate catastrophe, increased rates of autism and allergies, and the imminent threat of a globe-spanning contagious disease outbreak like SARS (a fictional flu pandemic is alluded to in the film). As the infertility remains uncured, so too is it unexplained for the audience. The best science fiction avoids pedestrian pseudo-science that tends not to date well (2001: A Space Odyssey being the exception that proves the rule). The most detail we learn is that women are infertile, and we can assume that cloning and artificial insemination of frozen eggs have failed. So by the time the film opens, the harsh fact that the human race is doomed to slowly die out is a given, and has reduced the world’s societies into chaos. Only Britain has been able to survive, to a point, using only the harshest totalitarian methods. In propaganda commercials glimpsed throughout the movie, Britain congratulates itself for the fascism that makes it possible to carry on; but is this kind of survival worth the price?

Immigrants flood the only country with some semblance of stability, fleeing unspecified atrocities abroad. All we learn of the United States is of a vague catastrophe in New York creepily referred to only as “it.” Immigrants are demonized as “fugis” (for “fugitives,” perhaps punning on the derogatory British slang “paki” for any and all Middle Easterners) and penned in concentration camps. Many shots explicitly allude to infamous images of captive enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay. Several of the fugitive voices we hear are German, causing one to wonder just what exactly may have happened in Germany, and if it may have been something we have seen before in human history. My German is non-existent, but If I’m not mistaken, we overhear one captive German woman bitterly complain to her guard for being locked up in a detention cell with black people. It’s not a pretty picture of human nature, that at the worst of times, the worst of us comes out.

The five credited screenwriters, usually a bad sign, have done an extraordinary job of adapting the original novel by P.D. James (who, according to IMDB, has an uncredited cameo in the café bombed in the opening moments of the film). I don’t know if I would go so far as to say the movie is “better” than its source material, but it is certainly more visceral and emotionally affecting to a post 9/11 audience. As an adaptation, the many changes are justified and benefit the translation to a different medium and time. Most significantly, the chronology is condensed from months to days, and the relatively polite insurrectionist group The Five Fish has become a full-fledged terrorist organization called simply The Fish. Theo (Clive Owen) is younger, and no longer living a life of wealthy ease. He’s a gambler and alcoholic, and his original motivation to help The Fish is raw money. His cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) is not the all-powerful Warden of England of the book, but rather merely the effete guardian of the Ark of the Arts. King Crimson’s dramatic Mellotron dirge “In the Court of the Crimson King” fittingly accompanies Theo as he visits Nigel, passing into a walled city that separates the privileged elite from the working masses outside (Naomi Klein predicts the future dominance of such places in the DVD bonus features). The Ark is a pointless quest to archive the world’s great works of art, including everything from Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, to Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig.

Several mind-bendingly impossible tracking shots grace the film, so fluid and justified by the action that the mind barely registers a lack of cutting. There is an incredible level of detail in the art direction, but as Cuaron declares in the DVD bonus features, the goal to was be the “anti-Blade Runner.” Two decades hence, technology has marched on only to a degree. What’s the point of innovation in fashion, automobiles, and consumer electronics when the human race is doomed to extinction? Eerie sights include fields of burning cattle corpses (possibly due to mad cow disease, or more likely the simple fact that the farming economy has collapsed), abandoned and crumbling schools, and the prominence of dog racing as the sport of choice in a world with fewer and fewer fit young people every day.

Children of Men may be a punishingly bleak vision of the future, but there is hope to be had. Theo is a broken man resolved to a slow death, both his own and of his species. But there is something special within him; his former lover Julian (Julianne Moore) trusts him over everyone else to do the right thing when presented with a gift of hope: the first human child in two decades. Even animals are drawn to him, including dogs, kittens, and deer. His friend Jasper (Michael Caine) praises the Hindu Peace Mantra, which also appears as an epigram after the credits (over the sound of children playing), and bears repeating here: Shantih Shantih Shantih

(originally published on my blog: http://www.thedorkreport.com/2008/08/29/children-of-men-2)