Children of Men

Heidi and I took a trip into the city to see Children of Men yesterday, as the only place it was playing was River East. In retrospect we won't do that again, as it cost an arm and a leg, but it was a decent time.

Anyway Children of Men was a brilliant film, filled with intrigue and maintaining a really high level of tension through a moderately long movie. It establishes a unique and intriguing concept and, at the core of it, distinguishes between the solid, enduring qualities of faith over the randomness of chance.

The film is about a world in which nobody has been born for over 18 years. As a result of no children being born and the imminent death of the human race, the entire world is in complete chaos. Britain is slightly less hosed than the rest of the world, which results in countless illegal immigrants to Britain. Subsequently, the British government initiates a violent, oppressive crackdown on illegal immigration. This is a world of despair, a dying world. The people have a lot of choices to deal with their misery, from antidepressants to easily available suicide kits. It is criminal for people to avoid fertility tests. Through a twisted series of events, Theodore Faron (Clive Owen) finds himself responsible for transporting a young pregnant girl to the coast, where she can get onto a hospital ship of a group called "The Human Project," a sort of underground science community that are working on the infertility issue. She, being the only pregnant woman anybody has seen for nearly two decades, is a commodity to whoever has a political agenda, and there are a lot of those.

This show tells its story succinctly and tightly, but with the viewer open to filling in a lot of the gaps. Not that there are much in the way of plot holes, but there's a lot of exposition that is left up to us to figure out (or not, as the case may be). As it is, it's still tightly packed with information, getting us up to speed on the world and the characters. I like how they use the countless bullets flying around the one remaining hope for humanity (that we know of, anyway) to such great degree. It's a plot device, but as soon as you see that this girl is pregnant, about a half hour into seeing the effects of infertility on the world, she suddenly becomes more important than any other character in the world. And there are alot of people dying through excessive violence around her.

This is a very violent movie, but I have a theory why (and keep in mind that, like much of the movie, this is completely up to the viewer). People fight because they're angry at how the world just seems to have shut off the switch for the human race; they end up taking it out on anybody around them. But also, what had stemmed the tide of excessive violence in society before was that there were children to think of. Without that impetus, there is nothing to live for, and therefore people don't so much care about the consequences.

The show isn't so much about acting or interesting character interaction, but Michael Caine plays Theodore's father figure Jasper, and does it with style. He's a great character that is an old, eccentric, hippie and Michael Caine plays him with great energy and fun. He's a little remaining spark of life in a society that has little life left.

I recommend this film, but it isn't for everyone. Heidi didn't much care for it, but I find it to be a deep and rich vein of thought-provoking material.