Monday, May 14, 2007

These are some strange "Children of Men"

The near-future, sci-fi story of "Children of Men" starts with interesting concepts - the youngest person alive is killed at age 18, the world has mysteriously become infertile, and there are still wars raged in the name of religion and immigration. The concept of how the world would change knowing there were no more children is starting to be explored. Our hero, Clive Owen (who can act better than anything about this movie), works in a crappy job, drinks too much and is basically just hanging on, though he has a friend, Michael Caine, who lives off the grid and sells pot to the police. It also turns out that before the fertility crisis, Owen had a wife (Julianne Moore) and a child. We find out Moore has become the leader of the people fighting the government's immigration policies. And that she has a pregnant woman she's trying to get out of the country. All of that was in the previews, if unclear. **Minor spoilers ahead**. That's about where the movie stops being fun or interesting. Moore gets killed in some massive plot to steal the baby, Owen asks his friend Caine to help, who gets killed too. So Owen and the pregnant lady break into a refugee camp to try to meet a boat. She has the baby (it doesn't turn out to be an alien or anything just a kid who awes everyone but whose creation isn't explained) and the movie ends with lots and lots of fighting. I liked "V for Vedetta" much better than this movie because the sci-fi aspects were all explained - the future was a crapheap, but at least the rules were pretty clear and those fighting against the rules really just wanted butter for their toast and sugar for their cofffee. With that kind of tongue in cheek humor about the future, it was watchable, and over the top at times, like good sci-fi should be. Children of Men is just kind of a draft version of the future, incomplete, and rough around the edges, making it very hard to follow to anything real or interesting.

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