Okay, I read this book ages ago for school. Now I didn’t go to see it because of this, and didn’t realize I had read the book until the first minutes of the movie, I was like, “oh crap”. Anyhow they’re two different beasts, and I’m fine with. I won’t bother comparing it.
The movie itself is sorta chaotic and disjointed, there’s a lot of hinting to things but never really any explination and the plot starts to disolve the further it gets into the movie. There’s a frankness and mirroring of pop culture fears and current events, with a forboading nature and cautionary side is of interest but the movie reviews seem to be largely symbolic for what the movie critisizes as opposed to any real content. Fear mongering, Orwellian societies, world wide wars, pandemics, opression, internment camps… its all there, but there’s almost no point. Most of the movie’s actual story points, like what the hell is going on in the world is skipped over. Instead the story feels like a vehicle to shock you of the cruelity of man and the shaky ground that civilized man stands on between disorder and chaos. I felt like I was watching war of the worlds, where the main character never really saw the big picture, instead was just shown seeing glimpses of chaos at every turn. Trying to shock my already fried synapses from years and years of violent games, movies, rap music and most of all, art schooling leads me just shrugging my shoulders. Yeah… so what’s your point? There really is none. A lot of gripes I have I can’t discuss without ruining the movie.
I’d get it about a C+. It plays out too much like a bastard child of an orgy War of the Worlds + Soylent Green + Saving Private Ryan. Its not a bad movie but just not very good. Most of the fanfare is servicing politcal ideals like Babel, which again I agree guns are bad , Americans are too fearful etc but just because I agree with it doesn’t make it good. There’s just too many unanswered questions so even an observated Clive Owens and icey cold Julanne Moore doesn’t keep it from being just “meh”.
Feel free to disagree. I must have not seen the same movie everyone else did.
I dunno, I saw Night at the museum with my younger cousins. It was okay. Anyone else pick up on the strange homosexual subtext between Owen Wilson (Cowboy) and the Roman guy? The I won’t quit you line is rather contextual to Brokeback and the fact that he was a cowboy (ha ha gay) and he was a roman (whom are historically okay with being gay, so ha ha ha gay), feuding like lovers and their overzealous car ride and you have a strange unspoken relationship.
I have to say I really, really enjoyed this movie when I saw it last year.
To be honest, I guess it’s a very British movie in many respects, dealing with many of the issues affecting British society at the moment, so I guess a lot of it’s power is lost when viewed in other countries.
I do have to admit that the central plot was perhaps lost a bit in it’s attack on the increasing racial tension facing society over here, but I kinda felt that was the point of the whole thing. The fact is that there has indeed been a worrying shift in popularity for the far-right, essentially fascist political party, the BNP over here in recent years due to what’s seen as a horrendously ineffectual immigration policy by our current government not helped by the recent admission of new Eastern European countries in to the EU. There’s a real feeling of people coming here from poorer countries to feed off our ‘easy-touch’ benefits system whilst the natives here work their arses off all day to pay for it all.
I’m not saying I agree with any of it, but it’s clear that more and more people are listening to the BNP’s politics and opinions and I thought that Children Of Men did a fairly good job in reminding some of us that 70 years ago there was a lot of similarily xenophobic feeling in another large European country - and we all know what happened there.
There have been so many Americans that have feared outsiders since the 1700s. (Meh, maybe the 1800s) Even look at recent times. Mexican’s stealing our jobs, anyone? (No, I don’t think that, shush)
No, Jep. The American immigration problem is completely different from that of European countries. Completely. The key difference between the U.S. and countries like France is this: when a foreigner enters France, the French demand that person respect French culture. Their country has been French for a few thousand years (humor this generalization for the sake of the argument), and there aren’t many Frenchmen who want that to change.
Americans, on the other hand, are mutts. We’ve always been mutts, and we always will be (unless the mer-people take over and kill us all, of course). When someone comes to live here, we don’t demand that they adopt our culture or our customs. Sure, there are some adjustments that an immigrant must make, but we don’t demand that everyone become an “American.” We’re all African-Americans, or Mexican-Americans, or German-Americans or Chinese-Americans or Irish-Americans. In France, and I would tend to believe in the rest of Europe as well, there is no “africaine française.” There is only “French.”
America sorta has some imposing cultural divides but the key is that the US has never had quite the extreme problems with religion, and racial integration asside from slavery. There’s been a long history of racial oppression but often not the extremes in the rest of the world. The long standing rule has been the roast beef and Apple pie syndrome as our lethargy towards issues when our economy is good. Immigration (as are most social issues) is a moot point when everything is fine here.
We didn’t get it right or do it better because if modern times speak true, our constant embrace of religion has kept us from adopting some standard medical practices Haman Papillomarvus (HPV) an STD easily preventable by vaccination but the most commonly transmitted STD in the US, as over 50% of the US population carries it (yes 50) and causes nearly 5k women to die a year. The pretext against vaccination is because it’d promote more sexual activity. Our backwoods ideology also leads us to have many other STDs, as gonorrhea is among US teens is seventy times higher than it is in the Netherlands and France. The problem is the lack of education, and social acceptance of common birth control, largely dictated by conservative religion motives to teach abstinence (nothing wrong with that, but by itself its stupid). Also against us for not really being better is our extremely high rate of violent death that makes us somewhere between 4-12x times worse than any other industrialized nation, high rates of poverty (30%, and any argument of standard of living is irrelevant as the poverty line to which one defines poverty in 1st world nations is just as high if not higher than the US) among many other problems.
The short of it, think of Europeans with nationality like Americans with race. The US still upholds the racist “one drop” notion, that if you have any black in you, you’re black. Now apply that mentality to immigration and in France. Notably France has a lot of fear, as there’s an extremely fast growing immigrant muslim population in France, that keeps rising, and with the muslim population, crime has risen almost directly proportionally with the muslim population. So these things are much more real there than here. Any Europeans feel free to chime in, I’m not the most versed on the immigration stuff, I just read BBC is all.
Anyhow, I had the feeling when watching the movie that the scenes of boxed up immigrants seemed almost alien to my Oregonian ass where as elsewhere it might be more real.
high rates of poverty (30%, and any argument of standard of living is irrelevant as the poverty line to which one defines poverty in 1st world nations is just
I figured someone would bust the strict over the relative. 30% is highish for relative more like high 20s, rest of my stats were lifted from sources at least
Anyhow, I had the feeling when watching the movie that the scenes of boxed up immigrants seemed almost alien to my Oregonian ass where as elsewhere it might be more real.
I think the whole Bexhill part of the film (without going into any spoliers) is an extension of stories like this and the general hysteria surrounding similar detention centres, both from those against the influx of immigrants and thus in support of these places (provided they lead to the removal of said immigrants) and those against them and the treatment of immigrants.
But then, at the end of the day, it’s also a very good dystopian-future movie, and I’m often quite fond of those for some reason.
I didn’t hate the movie by any means, I just wasn’t into it. I thought the actual just setting and vibe was fine, just the story seemed flimsy. I suppose reading the book got all the “What if” scenario questions out of my head, (again not comparing too deeply as the movie/book are mostly the same but end up going two different places). It was the best of the holiday movies I saw but my parents wanted to see Aragon, to which my brother and I started laughing when the dragon started talking to the kid, Rocky Balboa which is a bad movie but entertaining, and Night at the Museum which I was just bored in…. Saying it was the best movie I saw during the winter holidays is like saying, “Well it was the best Star Trek movie….”
The most interesting bits of the movie were passed over, like the TV showing the rest of the world, the news add for the the drug to end your life peacefully, the bizarreness of the people in general…
I disagree with you Greg, I think it is one of the best movies of the year.
I found it refreshing that the director chose to not focus in on the “big questions” or the Human Project. People are bitching that why women are infertile isn’t delved into etc. I think the movie is better that they didn’t. The reason why women are infertile is pointless; it doesn’t matter in the movie. The movie isn’t about infertility or the Human Project, it’s how society would react to such a catastrophic event, and ultimately how the human condition would survive. Rather, he focused in on Theo, and how he struggles through a world that’s basically torn apart. The cinematography, which is gorgeous, emphasizes this. The long uninterrupted tracking sequences give the film a voyeuristic feel - hence you feel righ there with the characters. And as thus, you aren’t given omniscient narrative bullshit explaining away the mysteries. You know as much as the characters on screen. It was gritty, forceful, and succinct. I’m so tired of movies explaining away everything and leaving you a nicely tied package with a bowtie to send you home feeling warm and fuzzy, and fulfilled. You never seem to remember what is thoroughly explained; not being told something is most of the time far more fulfilling for me.
Knowing nothing strikes me as a writing cop out if it never gets explained, it doesn’t have to exactly be over the head, but I dunno, I didn’t really care if her baby made it to them human project.
As Zack said, the movie focusses it narrative on political and social issues. Another thing that really struck me when watching the movie was the obviously rather cynical, though very probably accurate view, that faced with imminent, unstoppable extinction, the human race seems hell bent on fighting over the scraps that are left, finishing each other off even quicker than nature can rather than unite and actually try to do something to stop it.
