Children of Men - Discussion thread (1 Viewer)

[Sam Davatchi]

Maybe because those are non essential. Who cares? Something happened, pollution or mutation. Why she got pregnant? again mutation, not important. The story is about something else.

 

[Qui-Gon John]

Yep, a chase story set in a future where infertility has taken hold.

To each his own. To me, it had potential to be more of a sci-fi story, which instead played off as just action/chase, in a future environment.

 

[DaleC]

I just watched the film today for the first time. I was happy that the soldier yelled to stop firing, but when they went outside and EVERYTHING had literally come to a halt--well--it has become one of my favourite movie moments of all time.

Without a single spoken word, it showed that everyone in the world knew just how important and miraculous this baby was. It showed that all sides of the conflict KNEW that they had to protect this child and her mother. They knew it so fully and completely that everyone stopped firing in order to give them safe passage. It was a truly awesome moment.

 

[David (C)]

Absolutely not – COM is minimalist filmmaking at its most superior. (see: Cronenberg/Frears). I wish more directors would get a clue. They’d likely also get “final cut” – why not if they were delving a more commercial friendly length?

 

[Patrick Sun]

Perhaps, if you only focus on plot, but the subtextual layers of this film more than make up for any perceived deficiencies in setting up the concrete manner in which these circumstances could occur and develop.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

It WAS a sci-fi story. The chase story was simply the mechanism by which the different facets of this universe could be explored. Good science fiction is rarely about the science itself. The science is the MacGuffin which allows the contemporary world to be seen in a different light.
Unless my memory is failing me, I think this is the purest science fiction film since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

 

[UngersPride]

I rented this movie a few days ago.

Here's my brief review:

The Good:

1) Good direction and the action scenes are very well done. The camera work places you right into the action.

2) Gritty scenes and locales evoke a future of endless struggle and hardship. Well done.

3) Several excellent scenes: the car chase on foot; motorcycle chase; the silence when the baby comes out of the building; etc...

4) Caine and Owen do a stand-up job.


The Bad:

1) The movie drops you right into the middle of the action, and since the film is almost all action, we never really get the time to know the characters, or even to really care about them.

2) This film felt like it could have used an extra 20 minutes to develop characters a bit more and to lay the groundwork of why the entire world had fallen apart except Britain.

3) What is even more puzzling is, if Britain is the only country to still be standing, why would an organized resistance want to bring it down?

4) If babies can no longer be born, then all the struggle between the factions seems quite pointless, since everyone will be dead! This issue remained with me throughout the entire movie and helped to ruin a portion of the film for me.

5) One of the major flaws I found in the movie was its extremely heavy-handed use of propaganda. The director does it poorly and hits you over the head with it like he was wielding a 20-lb hammer. The movie is set in 2027 Britain, and yet we see paper flyers on a wall attacking Bush and saying "Get Out of Iraq"! WTF?

This type of propaganda in the film marrs an otherwise fine little movie. The director needed to use more subtlety. I do not need to pay good money to sit in a movie and be blugeoned by someone's political message; that's what documentaries are for.

Overall a nice little film. I don't think it deserves all the rave reviews it has been getting, but it's worth a rental. I would never want to watch it again though.

7.2/10

 

[rich_d]

As mentioned earlier in this thread, clearly the youngest man (baby 'what's-is-name) is killed outside of a bar in South America. So, life goes on elsewhere.

That fighting is relatively pointless is the point. Isn't that the human condition we find all around us?

The message on immigration etc. were a bit heavy.

I don't know if I agree about the character development. While I would usually agree with that point, here I think we find the central character to be a shell of a man, scared and indifferent. Do we really need to see him crying over the loss of his son to empathize with him? Is it not better to use our imaginations for this? As it is, his background unflolds as the story goes on and it worked reasonably well for me.

We see a hollow shell of a man and the surprise is that he surprises us as he does himself. The resurrection of a man, if you will.

 

[UngersPride]

While I agree that fighting could go on elsewhere, the director has failed to establish why society all over the world has broken down. A simple narrative at the beginning of the film would have helped here. It bugged me throughout the film, but I tried to watch based on the film-maker's premise that the world "just is".

I agree about the pointlessness of the fighting.

Character development: I see what you mean regarding Owen. However, I never felt I was given any time to sympathize with any of the characters or why I should care if they even survived. The female carrying baby in particular was hard to understand and when she did speak she was pretty rude to the Owen character. I simply didn't care about any of the characters. They all simply did this; went here; were chased; etc....

The director should have spent more time developing story and character instead of trying to give us a documentary cloaked in a movie. I personally felt it was a poor way to do a movie.

 

[Stephen_L]

The lack of background and characterization are part of the overall tone of the story. Cuaron was attempted cinema verite, where the film feels real to us, like we're living in it with the characters. He states as much when he discusses his use of long uncut shots in the DVD commentary. We meet the characters just like Theo does. Most are complete strangers to him (Kee, Sid, Fishes members), or are virtually strangers (Juliana, who he hasn't seen in twenty years and his cousin, who I also suspect he has not seen in some time) Only Jasper is a close friend and we do spend time with the two of them to get to know them. We are Theo's surrogates, we are living the story, meeting the people just as he does. Theo doesn't know why women are infertile, so why should we? He doesn't know if the Human Project is real, so why should we? It puts us completely in his shoes (or flip-flops, if you will)

 

[UngersPride]

I see what you mean, and I applaud the director for using new techniques and attempting to show us things in new and different ways. And part of the film does work on that level.

However, whatever technique the director is trying to use is marred by his political messages masquarading as a movie.

With little-to-no character development, coupled with the heavy-handed propaganda, the film comes across more as a political rant, and less as an engaging movie. To me, this is simply poor film-making.

Had the director used this filming technique without all the overt propaganda, then it would have been a much better film.

 

[Chuck Mayer]

I saw the film as defiantly APOLITICAL. I'm usually fairly sensitive to such things, simply because most in Hollywood are unsubtle or uninformed on a variety of important issues. I found Children of Men refreshingly determined to stay focused on issues of morality and sensibility over trite political statements. He rang the immigration issue hard (which I would expect), but he never explored it in such a way as to make a concrete statement.

I sincerely appreciated the deeper exploration of human interaction.

 

[UngersPride]

Hmmmm.....

Here is a list of just some of the political statements made in the film:

1) Anti-Bush paper sign and a "Get of of Iraq" paper sign hanging on a board which the camera focuses on. The film is supposed to take place in 2027 and not 2007.

2) British troops wearing American black uniforms. They stand around and herd obvious immigrants through cattle pens. The implication is that this is like the holocaust. There is even an elderly German woman speaking German to reinforce this thought.

3) British troops wearing light camo American uniforms. This, with the somewhat whitish/pale look to the buildings, along with all the carnage, makes us feel that we are fighting in Iraq.

4) Hundreds of Arab/Palestinian troops jumping and dancing through the streets carrying banners and rifles chanting "Allahu Akbar!" The director than proceeds to move us through, and among, this militant group, so that we can drink in this intoxicating mood....

I could go on....

However, the highlight of the film to me was when the woman brought out the baby and all the soldiers from all sides stopped fighting. Very moving. Too bad there wasn't more of this type of thing.

 

[Chris Atkins]

I won't comment on the politics of the film until I've read the book. From what I've heard they took a book that had a definite political view in one direction and changed the tone to either make it neutral or swing it in the other direction on occasion. Like I said, though, I can't really say until I've read the book.

I agree with Chuck, though, that the film is mostly apolitical. The central characters are clearly trapped between two waring factions, both of which want the baby for their own political purposes. We see the central characters fighting against each side at different times, so I'm not sure Cuaron really wants us to see either side as "good."

Now, of course there are the digs at Bush here and there...but I just saw this as the typical, trite, Hollywood political bull**** that we've come to expect in the movies. It's so surface level that it doesn't have any danger of swaying people one way or the other, IMHO.

 

[Stephen_L]

Ungerspride, I agree that the digs at Bush and Iraq are propagandizing, but happily they remain in background and aren't hammered home by the story. Like Chris, I chalked it up to typical Hollywood antipathy to conservatives and Republicans that shows up everywhere. I guess I can just ignore it if the director doesn't obsess about it. I disagree with some of your other points. At no time did dank, cold, gray Bexhill remind me of Iraq or Afganistan. The uniforms did not strike me as obviously American. Cuaron makes no bones about taking iconic images from recent past to make this future feel real and current. Those include the Abu Graib images, Holocaust images, 9/11 images (in the British ad, the twin towers in Malaysia were burning at the top like they'd been struck by aircraft like the World Trade Center) Cuaron was fairly even handed in villifying the repressive British government and the fanatical Fishes. The only really obvious propaganda for me was the immigrant issue. The immigrants are only shown being abused, caged or arrested. We never see them victimizing the Brits, or causing famine and shortages to the host country. No immigrant appears to be abusing another or engaged in the kind of criminal activity, gang violence that would flourish in the camp. All seem friendly, welcoming, accepting. Only Sid, the army and British Fishes show murderous tendancies. That struck me as unrealistic propaganda. Still these complaints are trivial to my overall enjoyment of the film/

 

[Tim Glover]

Nice summary Stephen.

 

[Patrick Sun]

If you saw little character development for Theo, you weren't paying enough attention. This is a film that demands a few viewings for it all to sink in. You may have knee-jerk reactions to some of the ancilliary stuff in the background, but that's your baggage kicking in, watch it again, take in more of the art design, and consider it for what it is at that time period, not in this time period.

 

[Kirk Tsai]

If this film is apolitical, I would have a big disagreement over the definition of the word. Any film that deals with social issues is making a political choice, even if the filmmakers do not make an explicit statement. Even if a film contains strong political statements, that does not equate propaganda. Politics does not only correlate to current American political parties, but to all sorts of social relationships.

This discussion further troubles me in two ways. First, it seems that the term "political" has a negative connotation to several posters in here. Art and film are not isolated in a vacuum. Personally, I welcome political views and arguments from filmmakers.

Second, why should we constantly designate "Hollywood" as a monolith entity with uniform thoughts? Cuaron and Lubezki are from Mexico, the writer of the novel and production designers from England, plus Owen, Caine, and Ejiofor. Everytime a film with a perhaps negative view of the current administration pops up, people cite to "Hollywood," whereas plenty of films that reaffirm the values of religion, capitalism, patriotism, etc. do not garner such a note of anti-Hollywood.

 

[Robert Crawford]

IMO, this is not a Hollywood film perse.

Also, after listening to an interview with the film's director, I think his main objective in this film is to display character studies that shows how mankind can lose their humanity. Any of the political undertones we try to connect from the film to what is currently happening in the world today is more from the personal political baggage each of us carries from within rather than any political messages coming from the film. I'm not saying the film isn't political, but I think the main focus for this director is to tell a human story in such a way that the audiences will have to think for themselves and gather their own conclusions instead of having a film that spells out every little detail to you like so many so-called Hollywood films. By doing so, the director has achieved his main goal which is entertaining his audience.



Crawdaddy

 

[Stephen_L]

Please don't misconstrue from my mentioning some political points in the film that I think it a rank piece of propaganda or poorly made. Children of Men was the best, most moving film I saw last year, narrowly beating United 93 as the year's best in my opinion. Unlike the opinions of some posters, the political elements Cuaron slips into the background (and they are there) are trivial in the face of the human story in the foreground. Some of the elements are clearly inserted to draw the modern audience into this world and give it resonance to our experience today. Ultimately the film is about despair and the possibility of hope, a powerful combination.