I agree, I liked how during the final scenes, he wasn’t inclined to pick up a dead guy’s rifle and start getting on the assualt. He just shelters Kee and the baby on the way out.
The one almost-fight scene I remember really making me think “ow!” is when they (just) squeeze out of the door away from Sid. He manages to get his body through after them, so Theo smashes a car battery(!) upside his face, using both arms. Very gritty, and looked very realistic. Not that I’ve seen that done for real.
I leaned over to my friend and whispered:
Now THAT’S assault and battery.
She did groaneth appropriately.
I saw it yesterday and thought it was excellent … for what it was.
It was a superbly crafted chase/escape thriller with a vision a the near future setting and world situation.
I couldn’t call it a deep sci-fi thought provoker that digs into complicated political messages or scientific ideas. In fact, even though that is the setting for the movie they never go down that road trying to explain the whys or the whos or the whats of what is going on. You just kind of know it’s going on somewhere in the background.
Which is what makes it so much fun. Your just thrown into this futuristic vision without much explanation and are there for the ride.
The worlds in chaos, nobody can have babies, a girl has a baby, and they have to transport her safely to some unknown people. Period. Now watch and have fun.
(side note)
i loved this movie and i loved bladerunner. but why do they attach the line to the film “a bladerunner for the 21st cebtury”? the two films were completely different types of flicks, the only similarity being they happened in the future. they’re not even in the same ballpark. very misleading tagline.
I very much enjoyed the movie, but quite honestly I don’t really buy the idea of the societal breakdown and the ramapant xenophobia that had overtaken England and the World because of the infertility epidemic. I was able to accept it for the sake of the movie’s story (i.e. the infertility epidemic and the breakdown of society are not really related except that the former is happening in a world of the latter with some other causes for the breakdown) and was able to enjoy the movie quite a bit.
The first I heard of it was in the box office receipts list from this weekend. I haven’t seen a trailer and the name definitely doesn’t grab you. But after reading this thread it sounds interesting.
I dispute the OP wholeheartedly and declare Children of Men to be a terrible film.
[spoiler]
It is apparently sufficient in British film that to keep the plot moving, it is fine to have characters that either grossly underreact or grossly overreact, with no explanation offered or needed for either case. Why is Britain expelling foreigners? Because they’ve gone mad, apparently. Why was there a violent coup in the Fishes’ hierarchy? Because they’ve gone mad, apparently. There are but two moments of clarity in the entire film, when Theo advised the Fishes to go public and when the soldiers realize there’s an infant in the firefight:
Why is this dismissed out of hand? The Fishes, under their new leader, talk about how the infant is a critical symbol of their movement. Doesn’t this require that they go public in some fashion? The claim that if the government learns of Kee’s baby, they’ll just take it and give it to a proper British woman. Is the obvious solution then not to take hundreds of pictures and hundred of hours of video of a pregnant Kee to remove all doubt that a pregnant woman exists and that the baby is hers? Have all public channels of information dissemination been destroyed? There is no future equivalent of YouTube where such images can be made public? If the reason for Britain’s madness in expelling (and apparently arbitrarily killing) foreigners stems from the loss of fertility (I’m not sure how it does - more on this presently) and the subsequent loss of hope, wouldn’t news of a pregnant woman in Britain be the natural solution? Is it conceivable that the British government, if shown a woman of obvious fertility, would not give her instant citizenship and the best medical care available? Consider the major news coverage and displays of sadness that follow the death of the “youngest person alive” at the beginning of the film. Is it inconceivable that similar coverage of a pregnant woman wouldn’t create an as great or greater display of positive emotion? To keep the bleak mood of the film going, though, we have to accept that the government would instead kill or expel Kee. Why? Because they’ve gone mad, apparently. The Fishes stage a coup by killing their leader, the plan being for hundreds of them to swarm the car and two of them on a moving motorcycle to shoot into the car that contains the very pregnant woman who is critical to their plan! Is there not an easier way to accomplish this? How does an organization who must keep underground and meet in small numbers in safehouses arrange for a few hundred of their members to meet in the woods and wait in ambush in surveillance-camera-happy (recall all the footage of the car shown during news reports) Britain? Why would they risk the police noticing, surrounding and arresting them? Why would they shoot in the direction of Kee? Because they’ve gone mad, apparently.
As to the expulsion of foreigners… I could easily imagine it if for some reason white women had suddenly become infertile (I mean, why not? It’s at most slightly more unlikely than the given premise that all women have). There is already an undercurrent of fear in the UK and other places that falling birthrates among the “native” population will cause the culture to be overwhelmed by relatively super-fertile Asian and African “hordes”. I can picture a British society expelling “darkies” and such if only to spend its final decades surrounding itself with the trophies and trappings and memories of an Empire That Was, with the final aging Briton standing on the Cliffs of Dover with a rifle in hand as final symbolic guard against the invaders. That is not the case in this film, though. Pity. With the classic British dystopian fiction 1984, George Orwell made the effort to suggest how, in the postwar chaos and implied nuclear exchange, Britain could morph into Airstrip One, a province of Oceania. There’s no similar progression here. Something strange happened, and eighteen years later, some really bad stuff is happening. Why? How? Because the world has gone mad, apparently.
2. The Honour Guard
This critical moment has of course been blown by endless replay in the trailers, but the reaction that the infant gets from the soldiers is refreshing because its the only time in the film when characters are not mad, apparently. The soldiers lower their weapons immediately when they realize a baby is on the scene yet, oddly, it doesn’t occur to anyone to get the baby out of there, to pack it and its mother into the relative safety of an APC and hustle them to the nearest medical facility. None of them talk on their radios to report this amazing development. In fact, beyond the first soldier who yells at his comrades to cease fire, none of them say anything at all. I can understand the reaction but not it’s length. Is there no officer in command of these guys? Do it not occur to any of the soldiers (or the people in the building who see the infant and are satisfied with the semi-religious experience of merely touching it as Kee passes) to follow this precious cargo, ask questions about it, protect it? I can forgive the resumption of the firefight, since military training takes over and the reflex when shot at is to shot back, but Theo and Kee walk away alone, everyone seeming to instantly forget about them. Why? They’ve gone mad apparently.
The ending of the film is at best unclear. What shape is the rest of the world in, anyway? Beyond propaganda (“Britain soldiers on”) and oblique references to art-destroying riots in Italy and something bad (“it”) happening in New York, there’s no indication that “The Human Project” has done Kee and Dylan any great service by getting them out of Britain. Doesn’t the boat represent just another temporary haven? Theo may be heroic for seeing Julian’s original mission through, but is this a good thing or a bad thing? What was the Human Project going to do that was any different from what the British government would likely have done (and it’s not enough to say they would have acted as Luke said they would, because Luke was apparently mad)? There’s not the tiniest bit of evidence that the Human Project guys represent sanctuary because all we know about them is filtered through the dialog of the various Fish characters, and even Julian, presumably the most knowledgeable of them, gets her info through a complex and indirect “mirror” process. It never occurs to anyone that the baby represents and requires a major change in thinking. Julian’s plan is to pass Kee along because Julian lives for conspiracies. Theo carries out Julian’s plan because he’s used to being told what to do (by her especially, it seemed). Luke makes violent plans because Luke likes violence. Syd sees the baby and once the shock wears off, resumes his corrupt treacherous ways. There isn’t a single character in this film who reacts in other than a mechanical, predictable way, because they’ve gone mad, apparently. Is this supposed to be heart-touchingly tragic or something? It’s very hard to summon sympathy for characters who never stop and consider the outcomes of their actions. Sure, Children of Men is bleak as only the British, masters of bleak, can do. But bleak doesn’t automatically make a film profound or thought-provoking or good.[/spoiler]
It occured to me after the fact that I’ve deconstructed a film in a thread that doesn’t specifically have “Spoilers!” (or similar language) in the title. I apologize and have asked that my post be altered accordingly.
In response:
Because they’re terrorists. A schism is not uncommon among idealistic radicals.[/spoiler]
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
[spoiler]Why is Britain expelling foreigners?
[/QUOTE]
I saw Britain’s draconian stance on immigration as a reflection of America’s xenophobic attitude post-9/11.
Britain, to many, must’ve been the last vestige of hope in a world that had all but self-destructed. The country rested precariously above the depthless precipice of anarchy with only the strict hand of an authotorian government keeping it from teetering over the edge; even so, violent terrorist activity was rampant. Even if Britain could have sustained the hundreds of thousands of vagrants knocking on her door, the political climate disallowed it.
Britain was going to survive by any means necessary. Allowing the penetration of their island by foreigners with possibly dubious intentions was detrimental to that.
That’s exactly what the British government would have tried, and I have no doubt that they would have succeeded. Unless the Fishes were there to videotape the child’s birth (which they weren’t), the government could have easily dismissed their assertions as propaganda from a violent terrorist cell. Even with pictures.
This is one part of the movie I can agree with you on. I think it could’ve been handled just a little better, but it didn’t leave such a foul taste in my mouth that I couldn’t enjoy the rest of the movie.
The ambiguity of the ending was, I thought, the perfect punctation mark on a film built around hope. Hope was not certain. It was not definite. It as ghostly and ethereal as the Human Project materializing through the fog.
I also loved the end of the movie because it left the fate of humanity open to interpretation. Could the Human Project rescue humanity from her eventual collapse into total anarchy or was she too far gone?
Theo does what he does because he’s transformed in the face of something extraordinary. He does what he does because he believes what he’s doing is right.
Luke does what he does because he believes what he’s doing is right. He cares less about the well-being of Kee and her child and more about using the child as propaganda for his own agenda. He, like the world he’s living in, is too far gone to be thinking rationally. He’s far too devoted to himself to realize the importance of the child as anything other than a symbol.
Bryan, I had many of your objections, but I still thought it was a great film. It was the energy and the pacing. I guess I have also become inured to the fact that Brits always seem to portray their government’s future as fascism.
I’m adding “Spoiler Warning” to the title of the thread.
I thought it was terrifically well-made by Cuaron, and for the most part well-acted. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I didn’t think much of Michael Caine’s performance. In fact, I haven’t liked him much in most things I’ve seen him in lately. Why do people think he’s so great?) I did have some slight reservations/questions, though:
[SPOILER]1)How did the world get into such a God-awful state? Watching the movie I kept waiting for some type of explanation, but none was ever offered or even really hinted at. I didn’t mind not knowing some things – I’m glad, for example, we never found out the cause of the infertility – but knowing why the world had descended into such barbarism shouldn’t, IMHO, have been left a mystery. So what happened? Was it because of the lack of babies? What did Britain do to make it the last country to survive? How did everything else fall apart?
2)What point was Cuaron trying to make about illegal immigration? Normally I wouldn’t think he was making any point about current politics, but he stuffed the movie so full of political references and current events (the Department of Homeland Security, Abu Ghraib, Iraq imagery) that you can’t help but think that some point about immigration was trying to be made. But what point was it? That no illegal immigrants should be deported? If so, his case was unconvincing, both for the real life debate, and in the context of the movie. That you shouldn’t torture people as you’re deporting them? Well, yes – of course not.
3)I, too, was a bit skeptical of the reasons why Theo and Kee didn’t go to the authorities, especially after they escaped from the Fishes. The fate of mankind literally rested in their hands – how could they have risked all the danger of trying to escape through the refugee camp? There’s not really any indication the British government would have taken the baby away from Kee; after all, the miraculous person here is Kee, not the baby – Kee’s the one who was able to get pregnant, and the British government – heck, every government in the world! – would have wanted to take care of her.
[/SPOILER]
Does the warning in the thread title mean we can fully dispense with spoiler boxes? In cast it doesn’t, I’ll use them.
That’s not any better than saying “they’ve gone mad.”
Well, I wasn’t going to mention the “Homeland Security” thing (for I know, it’s been a common phrase in Britain for years, as have “Home Office” and “Inland Security”) but although the U.S. did flirt with increased anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11, it faded fairly quickly back to its normal levels, while British attitudes remain as bad or worse.
[spoiler] We don’t actually know how devastated the rest of the world is, beyond a glimpse of propaganda and a few offhand remarks by some of the characters. The news footage of the death of the youngest person was from Spain, I think, and the glimpses of the improvised memorial didn’t suggest he was killed in the middle of a wasteland. Further, the anti-foreigner propaganda (“They could be your dentist!”) clearly showed that even established immigrants were being rounded up and the “native” population was being encouraged to help. The problem (well, one of many) is that the slang term “Fugies” is ambiguous - it could derive from “refugees” (those fleeing devastation) or “fugitives” (those fleeing arrest).
And Kee wasn’t really all that foreign, anyway. She had the accent, she used the slang. She seemed pretty damn assimilated. Black people are apparently not being universally expelled because several of the soldiers were black (and apparently Catholic, to boot) so what’s the deal with Kee, anyway?[/spoiler]
The only way this would make sense is if one has gone mad. Britain wasn’t going to survive (indeed, no-one was) unless they secured a supply of fertile women. It is inconceivable (unless you’re mad, and no pun intended) that Kee, with demonstrated fertility, would be expelled. There were numerous posters about saying the evading fertility tests was a crime. Have all women in the refugee camps been tested? If one had tested positive, would she stll be expelled?
What would be the point of that, though? The baby itself isn’t the most important element; the fertile Kee is. She’d be subject to extensive (but not damaging) medical testing and monitoring and repeated attempts at insemination (likely with XY sperm to produce more female children) as well as fertility drugs to get her to produce more children. She’d become the government’s breedcow, protected by layers upon layers of military security lest a rival government or someone who is mad (apparently commonplace in this setting) tried to kidnap or harm her. Fertile women would become the single most critical commodity ever.
[spoiler] Preposterous. If hundreds of pictures were taken (and modern digital cameras can easily manage this, let alone their 2027 equivalents) and sent anonymously to whatever news outlets are still functioning, can there be any doubt the story would be widely reported and believed. What purpose is served in denying it? Just have the Fish make a statement to the effect of “We have a pregnant woman under our protection, here are photos of her holding yesterday’s newspaper, here is videotape of her, attached please find a vial of a urine sample from her. As you can see, she is black and therefore ‘foreign’ under the current policies of the British government. These policies must stop immediately. Her name is Kee, here’s an audio recording of her, here’s her biography. The world has gone mad, we ask for a return to sanity at this critical delicate time.”
There is no indication that they even considered doing anything remotely like this. There were no pictures of her being taken and in the relative safety of the farmhouse, they could easily have let her deliver and made detailed video recordings of it.
Maybe they’re not mad. Maybe they’re just colossally stupid. Potayto, potahto.[/spoiler]
I could’ve stayed at home and had an equally meaningless experience. At least I would have saved $9.90. If the point of the movie is that it has no point, the filmmaker has wasted my time and I decline to compliment him for it.
Transformed? He runs from the farmhouse because Luke was going to kill him and then avoids the cops because they were going to arrest him for murder. The plan to get into the refugee camp was hatched by Jasper and Theo just stumbles along blindly. It’s not clear how the Fishes found Jasper’s residence; all it does is serve to force Theo to keep moving out of self-preservation, as is the case when he bashes Syd after it becomes clear Syd is going to betray them. Had he broken with the plans of Julian, Luke and Jasper and gone with his first suggestion, making Kee’s pregnancy public, that might’ve been cool. It also would have been the only moment in the film when a character took a deep breath and said “this is stupid, I’m just going to start behaving like an adult.”
[spoiler] Right… he’s gone mad. It makes for a convenient motivation but not a satisfying one.
As a simple action movie, and Children of Men doesn’t deserve to be thought of as anything more, I’ll grant that the gun battles were pretty cool. The drama, though, stemming from characters who are fascist and violent for the sake of being fascist and violent… useless.[/spoiler]
This post was brought to you by the CIA.
I never use “LOL” but I laughed out loud at that.
Personally, I would have liked it ifThe “rogue” elements within the Fishers were actually whacked out PETA types who wanted to kill Kee, thus ensuring that humanity would go extinct. I thought that after Kee had the baby, she should have just done a Lion King and held the baby out in front of her. Nobody sane would have messed with her. Though, a bleak ending could have been had with the baby being shot out of her arms by Luke.
I like your proposed ending a lot, bleak though it is.
I don’t like children, by the way. 
I wanted to start a thread about this a couple of months ago but when I checked on IMDB I found that Children of Men wasn’t going to be released in the US until January. Would have sucked if I’d started a thread that no one would be able to comment on. The early release was a reversal from the norm, where places like Bulgaria got Lord of the Rings three or four months before it was released in Japan.
The things I liked about the movie were:
The hero is not a Hero™. He hides, runs from trouble, barely fights at all, and yet has qualities that make him worthy of respect. He sacrifices to protect those he loves and those he sees a duty to protect. He deals with incredible difficulties, betrayal, setbacks, and a loss of all his support.
The gritty realism of the movie. There were very few things that were not realistic. People getting shot act like they’re getting shot. The main actors don’t have magic marksmanship abilities that kick in the first time they ever pick up a gun (in fact, I don’t remember Theo even picking up a gun). The actors did a very good job of acting like people in a crisis would act.
It didn’t preach. Aside from some background things, like the guy with a hood standing in the cage at the internment camp that looked almost exactly like the iconic image from Abu Ghraib, there’s almost no exposition about the evil gub’ment, the erosion of civil rights, or the self-destructive tendencies of societies in crises. It’s presented as: this is the world we live in, end of story. The details about how things came to be that way are sketchily filled in a bit at a time, but the focus is on “here and now,” and in coping as well as possible with a really negative reality.
The message of the movie is painted in shades of gray. Most of the characters are given enough depth to seem real. Their motivations are reasonable, from their characters’ points of view, and the conflict comes from those characters’ opposing viewpoints. I disagree with one of the earlier posters; I do not think that any of the characters are purely evil. I think that most of the characters are doing what they believe to be the right thing. The schism within the Fishers was very believable and due to differing opinions about ideology. Even the corrupt guard has understandable – though obviously self-centered and selfish – reasons for doing what he does.
The ambiguity of the ending was very refreshing. My wife disliked it for that reason. She likes all the loose ends tied up. You have lingering questions about both the past and future. You are invited to speculate about both reasons and resolutions.
That might’ve worked but it would’ve been a retread of one of the plot elements of 12 Monkeys.
The UK was the only nation left that had any semblance of stability (
Moderator: please erase my last post. I accidentally hit the “submit” button before I completed my message.
[QUOTE=NDP]
That might’ve worked but it would’ve been a retread of one of the plot elements of 12 Monkeys.
It was the “overcrowded lifeboat” scenario. The UK was the only nation left that had any semblance of stability (and even that was pretty fragile). As a result, everbody else in the world was trying to get in.
Personally, I thought there were waaaay too many absurdities. Not the main premise (which is just about the only thing Cuaron kept from P.D. James’ novel)- I could force myself to accept without explanation the notion that nobody can have children any more. What I COULDN’T buy, for even a split second, is the net effect.
History shows pretty conclusively that middle aged and old people don’t riot or protest. They don’t take to the streets with guns. That’s something young, bored people without jobs do. But the world we’re shown has no young people, and with so few people i nthe labor force, employment should be 100%.
In other words, the streets should be EMPTY, not filled with heavily armed marauders, because everyone in England should be either gainfully employed or too old to do much of anything.
The basic problem with the movie is that Cuaron’s vision of dystopia is completely incompatible with that of P.D. James.