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 Children of Men Released December 2006 Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, based on the novel by P.D. James Children of Men is set in the grimly-imminent world of 2027. Everything has fallen apart; countless countries have collapsed; refugees flee towards the increasingly authoritarian surviving governments. Pollution, disease, and radiation abound everywhere, and there seems to be no hope things can get better. Oh also everyone became infertile around 2008, for no clear reason.  The story follows Theo (Clive Owen), a one-time radical who gave up long ago, as he is drawn into a conspiracy around the first pregnant woman (Claire-Hope Ashitey) in about twenty years. It's a sci-fi dystopia, it's a grounded political thriller, it's about welcoming and desperation. It's this weird bridge between the anti-Bush leftism of the early zeroes, and the grim climate-focused strain of things now. If it came out tomorrow, people would roll their eyes at how on-the-nose it was.  It is also, at its core, just a very warm, human movie. I love the scene where Kee tells Theo that pregnancy takes nine months, because it's so strange to imagine a scenario where an adult might not know that. There's a whole subplot about how Theo keeps losing his shoes; he's in socks in the scene where they run from the Fishes, and wearing one flip-flop in the scene where he and Marichka kill Syd. There are just animals all over the place, even in the battle scenes. Anyway, I've seen this about a million times, so I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about it a whole bunch.  The movie packs a lot into its background. Theo spends the early scenes pointedly ignoring it all, the refugees being rounded up and the public exhibitions of mourning for Baby Diego alike. There are strange advertisements, rumours of nuclear war, unashamed doomsday cults. Early on, one of the Fishes (Patric, played by Charlie Hunnam) warns Theo he's being watched, and there are in fact plainclothes Fishes hanging around in the background of some scenes. Eventually the background swallows everything up, and Theo is a part of the grey masses in cages. He's not much of an action-hero; he spends most of the movie relying on the charity and goodwill of strangers.  A lot has been said about this tendency found in comic-book movies, to set up a villain who appears to oppose genuine injustice in the system, who is revealed to be a fraud, or self-serving, or fundamentally wrong in their critique. I don't just mean Black Panther, though that was the most talked-about case; you get a similar narrative in The Dark Knight Rises, Iron Man 2, the Watchmen TV show, Thor Ragnarok, probably a bunch more I haven't seen. And rewatching this I was struck by the thought that this movie skirts the line there too, with Kee and Theo being caught between the government and the Fishes. There's like a 45-minute stretch in the middle of the movie where the government is just not a factor; the time between Julian's death and Jasper's death is almost exclusively dealing with the rebels. When the government does come back into the movie, it does so in the form of Syd, who is this weird halfway ground between the state and the Fishes; he's a cop, but he buys weed from Jasper (it's still illegal), and spends half his scenes in civilian clothes and a keffiyeh - and in the end, he seems willing to sell Kee and the baby to the highest bidder, instead of his bosses. The police do everything in groups in this movie, while Syd is able to act alone and underground. Anyway, all this is to say that I don't think the movie places the Fishes as equivalent to the government. The whole third act is a rebuttal to that notion; the Fishes, along with half the people in Bexhill, are just plain exterminated, and the threats they posed in the middle of the movie seem slight, to me, compared to the final slaughter. The movie doesn't give much credence to the Uprising as a solution, but I can't see how anyone could watch this movie and see their desperate violence as equivalent to the concentration camps; the truth is not in the middle, it's all the way over towards one end. I dunno, maybe I'm just unwilling to criticise.   The Ark of the Arts is one of my favourite things in this movie. It's one scene, which could be replaced with a couple lines of dialogue in terms of how much it means to the plot, but it adds a lot to the story. Each one of the artworks lines up with something we see out in the world. Some of them are hard to convey with screenshots. Michelangelo's David pairs with Theo killing Syd, thematically rather than visually. Theo impales his bare foot on something sharp immediately after, while David is missing a foot.  Picasso's Guernica - bodies mangled and broken, all the brilliance of human invention turned towards their ruin - pairs with the bombing of Bexhill, which, again, is hard to get a good screenshot of.  These artworks have all been placed in a box where no-one can see them, but the things they represent - the human passions and agonies that inspired them - those are uncontainable, and appear wherever people are, even in the dying world. No Nativity scenes in the Ark, funnily enough.  This is the first movie in which I really noticed Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays Luke. He starts off the movie as just another Fish, not visibly more important than any of the other young enforcers. He slowly emerges as a sort of counterpart to Theo; a younger version of him, still fighting. They are both mourning someone; both willing to kill to protect Kee, both just barely keeping themselves together. He's not a heroic character - killing Jasper is, if not the most evil act in the film, certainly the most cruel - and yet I don't have it in me to hate the guy. In this latest rewatch I was struck by how the camera is so closely tied to Theo's viewpoint. As far as I can tell, there's only one moment where the audience sees something he doesn't: the scene where Jasper goes inside to euthanise his wife Janice. Clive Owen is rarely even off-camera for more than a few seconds. Maybe one of these days I'll use a stopwatch to figure out exactly what percentage of the time he's on the screen.  The movie is structured around a series of shocks to Theo's life. In the opening scene, he narrowly avoids a bombing in a coffee shop, allegedly by the Fishes; the radical struggle shatters a piece of his comfortable middle-class existence. About 25 minutes later, Julian is shot dead right in front of him; his link to the past (and half-formed hopes for getting back together in the future) is gone. About 20 minutes later, Jasper is killed, and with him the companionship and weekends away that made his life more bearable. About 15 minutes later, Miriam is arrested and probably killed; the fellow grown-up, whom Theo was relying on to take care of the baby side of things. There's just this feeling the whole time of the walls closing in, right up until, of course, the ceasefire. Anyway, the movie's good, and even if you've seen it, I hope I've shown there's a ton that comes out on a rewatch. If nothing else, it's also a Christmas movie, very literally. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Supplemental materials: The ads and newspapers and so on were done by a defunct company called the Foreign Office; you can see a bunch of it up close here. Here's a page on the locations they shot at. I knew those stairs looked familiar; they were in Lock Stock... as well. Behind-the-scenes look at how the car ambush was filmed. It's a bit overproduced, but it's fascinating to see the whole rig they built up on the car. The lady who plays Miriam also played Mrs Trunchbull in that Matilda movie. I couldn't think of an elegant way to work this into the post, but it's kinda funny. Finally, it's worth sitting through the credits for this one song that plays halfway through. Movie of the Month list Previous Movie of the Month
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Dec 1, 2021 11:44
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I thought about it, honestly, I did. But I decided I didn’t want to black out the whole OP, or limit myself so much in screenshots, and I figured that anything from trailers was fair game. Speaking of, I’ve got about a hundred shots from this thing, gotta upload some of the b-sides before the month ends.
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Dec 27, 2021 08:38
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Vitruvian Manic posted:I never got the supposed gutpunch of the movie. The real world is dying and there is no hope. There hasn't been, not meaningfully, since I was born. Even if they did recognise it, doesn't matter. Too late. World went to poo poo. Know what? It was too late before the infertility thing happened, for gently caress's sake. Anyway, it's a new page, so I'm going to drop a bunch more screenshots:                
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Dec 31, 2021 02:25
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