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Children of Men is probably the best near-future SF movie of the decade. See it! The ads compare it to Blade Runner, but I thought it shared more with 12 Monkeys, and, perhaps blasphemously, 28 Days Later. It's a bleak vision of a dying age—namely, ours—and as such it can be difficult to watch. There's an overpowering sense of the utter fragility of hope. But it's a thing of beauty.
The central premise is that everyone in the world mysteriously became unable to conceive about eighteen years ago, and there are tidily extrapolated reinforcements of that throughout—like the unusual numbers of people who own dogs, as poor substitutes for children, and the crumbling school half-reclaimed by nature. In many ways, it's our world today, but the knots of horror—Baghdad, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, New Orleans—have grown to entangle the whole. Long, long steadicam shots—nine or ten uninterrupted minutes, sometimes—refuse to allow the viewer any momentary breaks to distance himself. Powerful stuff.
The central premise is that everyone in the world mysteriously became unable to conceive about eighteen years ago, and there are tidily extrapolated reinforcements of that throughout—like the unusual numbers of people who own dogs, as poor substitutes for children, and the crumbling school half-reclaimed by nature. In many ways, it's our world today, but the knots of horror—Baghdad, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, New Orleans—have grown to entangle the whole. Long, long steadicam shots—nine or ten uninterrupted minutes, sometimes—refuse to allow the viewer any momentary breaks to distance himself. Powerful stuff.
