Children of Men is not as good a film as I thought it might be. It's awfully disappointing, and I'll have to say that it compares somewhat unfavorably to "V is for Vendetta". For my dollar "28 Days Later" remains the champion of the dystopic future of London film.
The premise of Children of Men of universal infertility is stunning and brilliant, but nowhere in the film is the drama of the kind of desperation one would expect of such a tragedy. I got a more riveting sense of emptiness and loss from Spielberg's "AI". Instead we get a kind of brooding tale drawn in the lines of the face of actor Clive Owen. He does an admirable job as the intelligent but scared man dragging a woman around the dangerous countryside, but he doesn't lose his mind or nerve and never quite turns heroic. His ability in the end to dodge bullets that are felling hardened revolutionary militia men just stretches the credibility of this flick beyond the sustainable.
In fact it is the end of this film where it all unravels. Aside from the gratuitous positioning of an idiot fascist Right against the weed smoking compassion of the Left with nobody by sheeple and radicals in the middle, there's a kind of clumsy individualism at play here. To her credit Julianne Moore dies quickly, but it really ruins the emotional and intellectual balance of movie. Where we might have had some deeper and more interesting dramatic tension between two ex-lovers still mourning a dead child while protecting the world's next madonna, we instead have an incoherently babbling gypsy woman and her dog.
One can tell that this film followed a novel too closely and left us without an internal dialog. Instead we have some stunningly gratuitous scenery. The film's greatest moment comes just before its hugest failure. The child is at last and finally born, a healthy girl. Her crying transfixes an apartment block which is in the middle of a deadly skirmish between muslim radicals, the underground radicals who have found the pregnant woman and a hundred British riot troops with tanks and APCs. As they walk through all the people fall to their knees and reach to touch the holy infant, all goes quiet but the sound of the baby's crying, the first child born on the planet in 18 years. The troops cease fire. The trio walk through the silenced crowd, and then it just goes totally wonky.
Not a single person from inside the building comes outside to defend the infant. Which is to say that this miracle of birth is not worth anybody's act of courage. Nor does the man call out for protection from the troops. Nor do the troops offer it. Somebody shoots a rocket launcher and then the firefight is on again, and the trio run off unhindered.
That is the most idiotic turn of events I've ever seen, and it defies the entire premise of the film which is that the birth of a child would be a world alteringly hopeful event. Yet those there at the very beginning do nothing. It's astonishingly cynical if we are to take it seriously, otherwise just pathetically juvenile screenwriting. In the end, there are only three or four individuals who show any backbone and presence of mind during this film, and that is what makes it so dreary and quite frankly unbelievable. I wanted this film to be better than it was, but it failed miserably. They shoulda got Spielberg.
And now my final and fatal blow.
The one thing that might have saved this movie would be the conversion of a depressed drunk, cynical man, representative of mankind, into a true hero. Instead he slinks and skulks his way through the entire movie. The rebels shot the mother of his child, in the face. She died in his hands. He hides. And so, in this regard, this movie makes Clive Owen less of a man than Tom Cruise in 'War of the Worlds'.
But maybe, just maybe, that's the difference between Americans and Brits. We still have some balls left.
It's very instructive to read Amanda Marcotte's review of this film from a feminist perspective. I think she's decrypted the babbling gypsy.
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