1/09/2007

Children of Men

Alfonso Cuaron has quickly become a favorite director of mine, starting with his explicit and endearing Y tu mama tambien, which he followed with the only good Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Completely different types of films, but both are rich with great characters and beautiful imagery. Cuaron is, simply put, a good filmmaker, so it was with great anticipation that I waited for his latest film to open in Omaha, Children of Men. And it was well-worth the wait.

Men takes place in the 2027. Humanity, for some reason, has not been able to procreate for the past 18+ years, which has led to, shall we say, widespread panic. There's some sort of decade-long siege going on in Seattle and England is in the process of deporting all their immigrants, called "foogees" (refugees), and sticking them in detention camps. Terrorist attacks have become an everyday occurrence.

They don't know what caused this infertility, which is the only part of the film that kind of bothers me. I mean, in over 18 years they couldn't figure it out? Did all the really smart scientists quit all of a sudden?

But I digress.

The basic plot of the film is that Clive Owen is yanked out of his apathetic lifestyle and thrust into the role of guardian of a young woman, a foogee, who, miracle of miracles, finds herself pregnant. Clive is charged with getting her out of England safely for reasons which you will learn when you see the movie.

It's just a great, great movie. Very moving, very powerful, and pretty damning of present-day humanity.

1 comment:

AliKat said...

Yeah, I think I would have liked it better if they had a good reason behind why women were infertile. But I guess having a reason would lead to the question of why couldn't they fix the problem. Awesome movie though. I'm really glad we got to hang out and catch up finally.