Just a quick review of Children of Men, which I saw last weekend in Los Angeles. Despite the promising premise, the movie itself was terrible: bleak and pointless. The MacGuffin is the first pregnant women on earth in 20 years, and the movie is basically a relay race to get her to the "Human Project".
First: bleak. The future sucks, and based on the news clippings scattered throughout the background of the sets it's all Bush's fault. It seems that invading Iraq led to a nuclear war (with who?) that pretty much threw the entire world into chaos and somehow sterilized all of humanity. England is the last holdout of civilization, and the government is chock full of fascist murderers who spend most of the movie gruesomely and casually killing all the major characters. The rebels are just as bad, and they account for several wanton on-screen murders, but it was honestly hard to tell the difference between the two factions after a while. Aside from all this, if the movie were merely bleak it would have been forgivable.
Second: pointless. If you're going to write a dark, depressing movie, at least give it a purpose. Children of Men had none, and explicitly so. There was no character development, unless getting casually, randomly executed counts as "development". What's more, I can barely count all the things the movie never tells us that would have given some depth to the story:
- Why is humanity sterile? If it's just radiation poisoning, there should be other signs.
- Why hasn't anyone tried cloning?
- How did the "heroine" of the story get pregnant? The movie explicitly refuses to explain her situation by having the woman tell us that there's no way to know who the father is (she's a prostitute) or why she's fertile.
- Who is the "Human Project"? What's their purpose? How will having a pregnant woman help them attain it?
- Why does the UK government put illegal immigrants into concentration camps? It the whole world is in chaos, why not just ship the immigrants back over the English Channel and be done with them? England must have access to the outside world, or where would they get their oil?
- Why does the pregnant woman need to be kept away from the government? Sure, they're fascist, but they really do what to cure humanity and they have a ton of resources. Everyone on the planet wants to restore human fertility, so is the pregnant woman kept out of the government's clutches just so that they can't claim credit?
- Why is the reaction of every person who sees the baby "oh wow that's amazing! Ok, I guess I'll just return to my normal life now"? If it were really the first baby in 20 years do you really think anyone would let the baby out of their sight?
And so forth. Honestly, the whole movie was full of holes and had no more purpose than if the good guys were trying to get the last donut at Krispy Kreme to the police station before the captain's coffee got cold. Other than the inherent sense of the importance of the first baby in 20 years, there was no explanation of how the story started or what would happen after it ended. If you really want to see gruesome, purposeless violence then go rent Faces of Death.
Mark Steyn reviews Children of Men here. The book was apparently very interesting, especially in light of current concerns about declining birth rates in the West.
Or, if you'd like to see a genuinely evocative movie about a utopia-dystopia in which all women are barren, try the greatly underrated Aeon Flux. As a bonus, you get to watch some nifty action scenes and drool over Charlize Theron in some very fetching catsuits.
Ok, I was trying to think of a short way to describe my view of 'Children of Men.'
Basically, it's as if some angst-ridden 14-year-old Columbine-esque Trenchcoat Mafia-loving violence-obsessed anti-Bush teenager wrote this film for his Freshman language arts class.
Whew.
I went to that movie with high expectations and came away just like you did. So much promise yet the movie didn't deliver at all. Wasted time and money.