April 20, 2007 at 11:11 pm · Filed under reviews
This recent review of Children of Men comes to us from the Jamaica Gleaner News:
‘Children of Men’ Intense on Reproduction
MOVIE TITLE: Children of Men (two-disc special edition)
RATING:(A+ entertainment)
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr. 49 mins.
BONUS FEATURES: Deleted scenes, special features on futuristic design, visual effects (creating the baby), The Possibility of Hope (a documentary on the themes of Children of Men), Theo and Julian, subtitle tracks in English, Thai, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese and Indonesian.
WHO’S IN IT: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Set in 2027, this story surrounds a society that has lost its way and its future. It has been 18 years since the birth of a child and the youngest human being on the planet (the latest version of a superstar), an 18-year-old boy, has been murdered. The movie is set in Britain, by then the most wretched place on earth, and attempts to show what will ultimately happen when tradition is eroded, when fear and despair take over. Britain makes an appropriate setting because that society rests mainly on tradition and is not governed by a constitution, so when people no longer care to maintain tradition the effects are extreme. The movie is rife with symbolism - scientists gather to figure out why women have stopped reproducing while they dine on storks; the Michelangelo sculpture of ‘David’ is shown in a sterile loft high above the decaying city with a prosthetic as one leg and the one pregnant woman, whom the hero Theo (Owen) tries to protect, is a young black, refugee. (Talk about irony).
The hero himself is anything but heroic. He is an ordinary guy, experiencing the same kind of malaise, apathy and disillusionment as everyone else. He is unwillingly drawn into the plot to protect the mother and insists on getting paid. He is passive, doesn’t fight back and barely gets one step ahead. He loses his shoes (which self-respecting hero loses his shoes?) and attempts to preserve our only hope wearing flip flops.
LONG STORY SHORT: The movie suggests what the world will become when all our traditions are eroded and man is more loyal to his ideas than to other human beings. It ultimately states that man’s only hope in such a situation is to form a new society, sever its roots and start over.
THE REEL LOW-DOWN: If you like political dramas like Lord of War, you will like this.
- Alicia Roache
April 4, 2007 at 4:00 pm · Filed under reviews
While the rest of the world has collapsed into chaos, the United Kingdom conjured up in Alfonso Cuarón’s gripping but problematic dystopian thriller is hanging on by a militaristic thread. Terrorist bombs explode near Piccadilly. Immigrants and refugees are rounded up and held in pens, awaiting deportation. The world is plagued by infertility: it’s been 19 years since a baby was born. How do you live with no hope of a future for the species?
The former activist Theo (Clive Owen) has succumbed to whisky-fueled numbness—until he’s called upon by his ex-lover (Julianne Moore), now a radical leader fighting for refugee rights, to get transit papers for Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), a young African woman who desperately needs to flee the country. There’s good reason for the urgency: Kee is pregnant.
Cuarón and his phenomenal cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki bring this bleak, terrifying near-future to life in astonishingly tactile images. Cuarón (”Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Y Tu Mamá También”) is one of the most exciting filmmakers around. He stages breathtaking action sequences: one in which marauding thugs attack a car in the countryside is unlike anything you’ve seen.
The filmmaking is so accomplished you wish it were matched by the script, which was adapted from a P. D. James novel by Cuarón and four other credited writers. (That many scribes is never a good sign.) “Children of Men” is clearly more than a thrilling chase movie: it’s meant to hold a barely distorted mirror to the world we’re living in now. But the characters are too sketchy for the political metaphors to resonate. (The exception is Theo’s old hippie mentor and friend, beautifully played by Michael Caine, a pot-smoking cartoonist who’s retreated to his hidden home in the woods.) The infertility theme isn’t explored in any depth. What exactly will it accomplish to get Kee out of the country? Since the future of mankind rests on this pregnant girl, we want details. “Children of Men” leaves too many questions unanswered, yet it has a stunning visceral impact. You can forgive a lot in the face of filmmaking this dazzling.
April 2, 2007 at 6:05 pm · Filed under reviews, articles
By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer
The best science fiction talks about the future to talk about the now, and “Children of Men” very much belongs in that class. Made with palpable energy, intensity and excitement, it compellingly creates a world gone mad that is uncomfortably close to the one we live in. It is a “Blade Runner” for the 21st century, a worthy successor to that epic of dystopian decay.
Like that earlier film, “Children of Men” is based on a novel (P.D. James this time, not Philip K. Dick) and deals with the question of the future of human life. It brings so much urgency to the possibility of the world ending that we feel the kind of terror we would if the scenario were taking place tomorrow instead of 20 years in the future.
Also, in Alfonso Cuarón, “Children of Men” has a strong director with a powerhouse visual sense who is at home with both action sequences and philosophical concerns. Cuarón, with such widely diverse films as “A Little Princess” and “Y Tu Mamá También” behind him, demonstrates once again that no genre is beyond his mastery.
The plot hook of “Children of Men” is simple but devastating: the infertility of the entire human race. The date is 2027, and it’s been 18 years since the Earth’s last human child was born. James, whose novel has been altered considerably by the film’s five credited screenwriters, says she wrote it to answer the question, “If there were no future, how would we behave?” The answer, in a word, is horribly.
For what “Children of Men” shows us is a world coming apart at the seams. Britain, where the story is set, has survived by becoming a chaotic police state in which rioters fueled by pure fury attack whatever moves and heavily armed police and savage dogs keep a close eye on ever-present refugees stuffed into sidewalk holding tanks. “Renouncers” flog themselves for the forgiveness of humanity, public service ads insist “The world has collapsed, only Britain soldiers on,” and an underground group called the Fishes fights for equal rights for that flood of immigrants.
This, again like “Blade Runner,” is an undeniably pulpy premise, but two things elevate “Children of Men”: One is the sheer forcefulness of the storytelling, the other the film’s brilliant visual look and style.
The story line here is again quite simple. A disheartened bureaucrat named Theo (Clive Owen, master of the disillusioned look) has cut himself off from most human contact except for an old friend and hippie drug dealer named Jasper (Michael Caine in a way we’ve not seen him before).
This all changes when Theo comes face to face with Julian (Julianne Moore), his old flame who turns out to be part of the leadership of the Fishes. She and her lieutenant, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Luke, want his help in procuring exit visas for a young refugee woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey). It will surprise no one who has noticed “Children of Men” is opening on Christmas Day that, astonishingly, Kee is with child. Theo reluctantly agrees to help, and all kinds of unexpected complications follow in the wake of that decision. Everyone has agendas within agendas, and even simple notions, like the importance of getting Kee to safety, turn out to mean different things to different people. And, because of Kee’s urgent condition, every decision is taken under the ever-higher pressure of increasingly dire time constraints.
The critical factor in helping keep that tension at a high pitch, critical in getting us to take seriously what could be a lurid premise, is Cuarón’s skill in not only motivating his actors but also in creating such a ferocious sense of forward momentum that everything feels more real — and more terrifying — than would seem possible.
Essential here is exceptional work by production designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland, who create a world of garbage and decay that looks both contemporary and futuristic. Most remarkable of all is what Cuarón’s longtime director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki has accomplished by shooting entirely hand-held with few lights, greatly increasing the film’s verisimilitude. Although everyone will notice the bravura work of camera operator George Richmond during one continuous seven-minute-plus battle scene, the skill of the cinematography team carries the film from the beginning to the end.
Perhaps most delicate of all is the way director Cuarón has made “Children of Men” comment on the problems society faces today, crises involving racism, terrorism, decaying infrastructure, threatened environment, government-inspired paranoia and more.
This is a world of rubble, fear and hopelessness whose connections to our own are never forced; Cuarón is such a fluid director with such a powerful imagination, they don’t have to be. This could well be our future, and we know it. kenneth.turan@latimes.com
