Saw this yesterday. Technically brilliant, virtuoso sequences. Production design excellent (although I agree with one person I read who opined that it had a very "Half-Life 2" feel). The problem I had however is that I didn't find myself emotionally drawn into the story. I didn't find myself really caring for the characters or their plight. As for the plot, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of substance. I wanted to know more about what might have caused the worldwide infertility epidemic. I wanted to know more about the Human Project. Overall I found myself wondering what the point of the story was. Hope? Renewal? It seemed to be one part Logan's Run, one part Blade Runner. I'll buy the DVD, because I did enjoy it, but it wasn't quite the overwhelming experience I was anticipating.
I plan on seeing this one later today. 11:30 matinee while the kiddies are in school and the wif is starting her new job...
I agree with you 100%, Flashy. The wife and I saw the film Sunday and it's very disappointing. All build-up with no pay-off.
Wow. One of the most depressing movies evah! I felt like a scumbag for being human just walking out of the theater. I don't see what the uproar is about here. There's no closure, no ending to this movie. And they never explain how one baby is going to fix the rest of the worlds problems, which, if you notice, go faaaar beyond the fertility issue at this point. Owen's character delivered the punchline very early in the movie: It was too late before the infertility issue came up.
To be fair, the novel on which this movie was based was written before Half-Life 2 was, so that explains the similarities in the "world" to me. Wait, since when do you want technobabble? By not going in depth about them, the audience is allowed to draw their own conclusions about their intentions. As I'll discuss in a minute, I drew very dark conclusions about the Human Project. That's just the thing. There is an ending, and it is very dark. It's just not wrapped up in a pretty little bow like we like nowadays. Basically, it shows the hopelessness of it all - we, as the audience, know something that the characters of the film are too deluded to realize - the baby will solve nothing. If anything, it'll make things worse. And that's why the journey as a whole was really for nothing. The sacrifice, for nothing. And hell, that whole Human Project thing was pretty fucking shady to me in the first place. When I imagine just beyond the movie, I see the baby being swiped away and used for political gain by this group just like everyone else wanted to do, but now Owen isn't around to protect the world's only newborn. Either that, or mother and daughter being used as guinea pigs for a bunch of overzealous scientists.
The film had made a point of stating Theo had lost hope for the future when his son died. What we saw in the beginning of the film was a bitter, alcoholic man (and can you really blame him?). I'd also state we don't know how bad the world really is. There was little reason to believe what the government was saying. Just listen to the PA system at the refugee camps (though that they existed certainly says something). Overall CoM is extremely ambiguous. Hell, it's even possible the Human Project was the group that caused the infertility in the first place and they're trying to finish the job. If you're looking for a happy ending, the sound of children playing at the end credits could be taken as a good sign. And how is it we got this far in the thread and no one mentioned the absolutely excellent action sequences in the movie? Those alone made the movie.
Do you know what REALLY freaked me out? You know those flat screen TVs everywhere, e.g. i dont know.. the BUSSTATIONS?? stating how everything is fine and dandy, and britain rules etc etc etc? WE HAVE THOSE IN OUR BUS STATION! Those actually exist! They were put in a couple of days before I saw the film, and they loop a mix of ad's, horoscopes, and videos going on about how there's less litter, decreasing crime, more police on the beat, isn't everything wonderful etc etc etc Just thought I'd throw that in there.
There's a couple reasons a lot of movies like these (remember the Guy Fawkes movie last year- V for Vendetta?) are set in Britain, I think: 1. Island nation, so it's easy to conceive of 'sealing it off' from the rest of the world. 2. You guys are halfway there already, with the gun bans, the surveillance, and the 'big brother' voices over public address systems. I know none of the Brit wordforgers are really expressing undue concern about this stuff, but it brings to mind the story about the frog in the slow boiling pot: by the time he realizes the water is too hot, it's too late and he's cooked. There's some whacked out shit going on in England with the surveillance and stuff.
Want to see something really creepy? I saw this on Digg yesterday. I really enjoyed the movie, I was depressed for a day or so, but still it is a great movie.
Oh, some of you might enjoy this: Every now and again, CCTV pics of people caught vandalising buses are printed in the local paper, so they can be IDd and turned in.
I did. But my review was completely ignored. Seems it was ahead of its time Ah, the hell. I'll just paste it in here before that thread gets locked automatically.
Good review Cass. I actually liked that they didn't explain the infertility. It lets you associate with the confusion that must be gripping the world. And if scientists really understood what was happening despair and dysfunction wouldn't be so much of an issue. There would be some hope that a solution could be found. Plus any reason they gave would probably sound hokey. Let the viewers come up with whatever they want. Pollution, terrorism, the wrath of god, what have you. I also agree that this is the most "real" dystopian society to date. Most films rely on great leaps to posit the rise of fascism, but CoM is very much grounded in the issues the West is struggling with right now. I don't believe it will happen but it's a very plaussible worst case scenario. I can accept people going about their daily life. It's what people do. Dimitri Shostakovitch wrote much of his Seventh Symphony while St. Petersburg starved under a Nazi siege. Though it is hard to imagine a lot of people staying in the army. Perhaps much of society would function by sheer force of habit by that point (that's how a lot of it seems to function now). I think the main point of the film was Theo finding hope again.
Decent film, very well produced and extremely convincing. A pity that the story didn't really go anywhere.
I, too, thought the dystopian world was depicted with a haunting clarity. I felt deeply for Theo's despair and for Jasper. I was haunted by the question of how it would affect people's psyches knowing that in 60 or 70 years there would be no one left. Just sit and think about what it would be like. It's scary as hell. How many of the things we concern ourselves with would cease to matter? It wouldn't matter if you had kids or not, or even wanted children of your own. Just knowing that no one was going to be here would cast a pall of despair over everything. Global warming? Fuck it. Voting for goverment officials? How are their policies going to affect the world of tomorrow? Does it matter? There won't be a society tomorrow. What kind of world will we leave behind for our children? What children? Nobody left to read our story of what life was like for us. Shall we go to Tunisia and search for archeological discoveries? Why bother? No one will be hear to read about them or do further research in the future. The utter fucking hopelessness of it all....mind boggling. What use is there for long term planning of anything? Would it be worse for the adults that remembered the world the way it was before the infertility happened or for the young people who grew up after there was no hope? Can you imagine being in that last class of children in elementary school, born in 2007, knowing that there was no more? A few left who were born in 2008 and finally little Diego in June of 2009. Growing up in a world with no hope. Why bother to go to university? That stayed with me. I thought to myself, "Growing up in this world would be like being 90 plus years old your entire life." You still want to enjoy life, but making long terms plans just doesn't happen during a person's tenth decade. You could take trips or be with family, but you don't make plans for college and graduate school at that age. The world would change each progressive year as less and less people remembered what it was like before. And yet they still fought. The fact that this world was so close to ours, not so very far removed, that we could live to see it chilled me. With no hope, society falls apart. That was the point. Cuaron demonstrated that with chilling clarity. Theo having some hope for the first time in 20 years was the point of the film. It was hope they were clinging to, not definitive answers. Suddenly, with just a spark of hope, Theo could function again. Even Jasper was revitalized. When he had to euthanize the dog, though....powerful. The details of it all is what got to me. All the people carrying around their dogs, their pets being the only thing they had left to nurture. The despair that the person in the world closest to childhood, Diego, had been killed. Nobody knowing that you had to burp a child because no one remembered how to take care of babies. No one under 40 would know how to handle a child because they never had. A whole generation of people who didn't know you had to burp a kid; it's unbelievable. Still, I can understand the frustration with the seeming lack of closure to the film and its lack of answers. As heartening as it was to see Theo with hope, I couldn't help but also thinking, "What if Kee is just a blip? A throwback to women with uninfected reproductive systems? She couldn't produce enough children to repopulate the planet. Her child couldn't do it either. Kee's child would come into a world where the closest person in age to him/her would be 19 years older. Assuming you aren't felled by an accident or illness, 19 years is a very long time to be the only living person left on planet Earth. There would have to be a last person left alive at some point (there's a comforting thought to all the little kiddies born in 2007 and 2008 ). Kee's child could potentially end up being another baby Diego. Even if the scientists could figure out why she was fertile, that doesn't mean they could fix any other female on the planet in time. How many women left between 20 and 40? Any natural period of fertility for females would die out before humans would die out completely. Nature designed women to lose their fertility after a certain point because pregnancy is hard on the body. These scientists, realistically, had about 20 years or less to fix the fertility problem if it was fixable at all. Even if a few more fertile women popped up, they couldn't produce enough children for a viable gene pool of repopulation. So, that was my problem with the film. I loved the world it created, and its message of hope, but I couldn't buy into the hope in that situation.
