'Children of Men', the new Alfonso Cuaron sci-fi flick

That said, Owen is really excellent, he carries the film with a kind of sullen, drunken, physicality that work very well indeed especially given that for much of the action the camera is lurking behind his shoulder and simply following him. On which note, the cinematography is simply stunning, easily the best I've seen this year. Without laying on any spoilers, there are two one-take shots which left me mouth-agape with amazement.

It is incredibly visceral in parts, and makes for pretty uncomfortable viewing. I got the impression that Cuaron's depiction of a ruined England only a few years hence was actually a comment on the dire state of so many cities in the world right now. There's a savage immediacy to the film that makes it very compelling viewing and I'm keen to see it again.

but that's just the surprise-reveal of the trailer, innit? "IN A WORLD WHERE WOMEN ARE ALL BARREN" and then oh, hang on, she definitely seems pregnant...

Pfft, I'm judging something I haven't seen. I'll see it and then I'll tell you what I think.

***POSSIBLE SPOILER??***

i think its just the trailer - the pregnant girl is a 'non-english' refugee in a film where 'non-english' refugees are all being locked up, which is why the white people are fretting about her. she talks a fair bit in the film.

As I remember the ending of the book was k-rub and the film will have its work cut out to make it less so.

haha, me too! that's the first thing i thought when i saw the trailer.

i think i've read it too but it's v hazy as it was around the time it came out (93?), i think we were on holiday and i ran out of my own reading material and started on my parents'. i do remember loving it, but i always love bleak dystopic stuff set in the future so that means nothing. in the time out interview cuaron says he wanted it to feel like it is/could be happening now, so maybe they added some race/refugee stuff in there...

so, a bit of a mixed bag overall. i think this was the first pd james novel that i didn't read, so i have no idea how it compared to the book - was that similarly lame towards the end?

oh dear, am i praising a load of sigur ros now? even the soundtrack went downhill in the 2nd half, loads of john tavener nonsense, i think.

It WAS supposed to be happening now, or at least as close to now as makes it relevant (ie 2010 or something). I remember there being references to Neighbours and so forth that doubtless won't get anywhere near the film.

I never want to see films, but I rather want to see this one. Can't do any time this week, though - I might go and see it in Streatham on Saturday if it's still playing.

Hah, that's exactly the same reason I read it too.

Yes, it would have been about '93 at the latest, because it was when I was on holiday with my parents in Kent, and '93 or '94 was the last year that we did that.

there are one or two scenes where the acting's a bit cheesy but it kind of worked as a foil for all the unrelenting grimness, i am not let down.

we went to barbican in the end so the sound was wicked.

i will not spoilerise, so if you haven't seen it's safe to keep reading.

it's creepy as hell how cuaron's depiction of london in 2027 is pretty much exactly how my own head pictures it (and plenty of other people i'm sure) - advancements technologically but used for regression of society (eg the bloodyfuckingirritating advertising screens we have in buses now are used for urging people to "DOB YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILIES IN FOR BEING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS", there are security checkpoints on the tube - "you are now entering zone 2" - guards with kickass guns and "please present your ID cards" (ho ho except not really), even bigger gaps between the rich and the poor - that scene in battersea power station is nuts. all that "jobs for the brits" stuff was well scary and made me think of the usa now. the montage of all the countries that had given up while "britain soldiers on" summed up the desperation of "soldiering on" - i mean bloody hell, what FOR? lots of really nice touches like the evening standard boards (if you keep an eye out for the details in this film you'll be well rewarded, i'm sure there was loads of stuff i missed but still), some that'll work for everyone, some that were personal - like this grubby little bridge they cross at one point is one i have crossed lots and lots of times. i loved how they did the music in jasper's house too. i was in bleak mood even when i went in, this didn't help (or helped immensely, depending on how you look at it), i left the cinema shaking, LOVED it start to finish and the human race can go fuck itself hurrah.

um i haven't completely processed it yet, i def want to see it again, perhaps not too soon, it was kind of hard going. in a good way.

"Emotionally draining" is the best I can sum it up with.

Sound engineering is spot-on, too, as is the no-holds-barred approach to the violence.

yeah it's a reference to the cover of pink floyd's animals LP.

http://www.thebestofwebsite.com/Photos/Music/Pink_Floyd/Animals.jpg

the reason it's such a good reference (and therefore not really a joke, as such) is that it's something you can actually imagine happening soon in the version of britain which may have immediately preceded the police state in the film, i.e. britain as it is now. it's not even a stretch to imagine it happening.

my expectations were not particularly high for this (and madchen, the trailer makes it seem like it's going to be a much worse film than it actually is) but i thought it was absolutely brilliant. packed with great moments and scenes: the kitten crawling up clive owen's trousers, him walking around in flip flops because he's left without his shoes; the scene where the five main characters in the film get ambushed after having their path blocked by a burning car; the battersea power station scene just mentioned with the young guy and his ADDish addiction to some transparent version of the internet). There are things which seem like small ideas but which actually make the whole mess seem entirely feasible: the fact that Julianne Moore offers Clive Owen £5,000, which seems a paltry amount of money for something set in the future until we see him stooping to pick up pennies from the street a few scenes later. it's a very clever touch in a very intelligent film. it's also quite thrilling to see something of this scale which is not set in america.

Haha one of the two errors noted on IMDB is that they get into the wrong kind of fictional bus!

Me and Emsk both thought/hoped the geordie terrorist was going to be Jake from Doctor Who! But it was someone else off Byker Grove instead.

yeah its one of the best scenes

The levity certainly sets you up hard for the sucker punch.

It certainly does put pressure on the wound.

Apparently it took 8 days to film that sequence.

i believe it

There’s a doc about it on the blu ray. Prob also on YouTube. They had to build a crazy car rig.

8 days seems low!

I need to rewatch this soon.

I'm sure the video goes into that elaborate car rig they designed.

They only had that piece of road for 8 days, so iirc they spent a week rehearsing, then had time for three takes.

hesitate to post this because it mentions so many critic/theorist/historian names that i assume it's going to piss off everyone, but i enjoyed ("enjoyed") this piece

https://www.newstatesman.com/children-men-alfonso-cuaron-2006-apocalypse-coronavirus

It’s kind of all over the place. I read the conclusion twice and wasn’t sure what the point was, but if it’s “watch this movie” then OK

It's quite entertaining as a provocative piece painting a broad-brush extreme dystopian pessimistic mood. But the overall point and details jump around wildly.

It's wildly inflated: it's a piece saying 'hey the mood of Children of Men resonates quite a bit with the current devastated state of the UK', and then tries to assume an of authority to move onto considerations of if it's too late to halt the juggernaut of something not quite specified (coronavirus, global pandemics, climate change, global capitalism, fatalism and passivity?).

On the plus side, at least it didn't throw in the global spectacular consumer economy.

i read it last night, it seemed fine and uncontroversial to me, mostly a round-up of things people have already said

This film was very quick off the mark to use dubstep in the soundtrack. As it turns out that was one of the less credible projections for 2027, although it's mostly not mixed all that prominently anyway.

Well... I hope in 2027 when the entire world is firm in the grips of a massive dubstep revival that you come back to this thread and apologize roundly to everyone reading.

Lol yes - That scene read very much to me as the 2027 version of “old git blasting Led Zeppelin”

That's the vibe I got, too!

LOL are you grandad's talking about Jasper's "zen music"? That's Aphex Twin IIRC. The dubstep stuff is playing in the background of a few scenes and presumably supposed to be contemporary; Kode 9 & Spaceape in the pub I think, and Digital Mystikz Anti War Dub which I just checked prices on and if there's a revival in 2027 I'll really be wondering if I should have hung on to those DMZ 12"s a bit longer.

ahh i had never noticed that. well 90s house continues to be fucking everywhere, so....

Good on that!

Also Roots Manuva's Witness (1 Hope) in one scene, which will probably still be getting rinsed in 2027. I guess maybe in the world of the film pop culture stagnated when there stopped being young people?

that’s a really good point

Yes that works out rather well. I mean I think really the music was used as a signifier of 'near future urban dystopia' rather than any serious attempt to predict the pop charts of 2027, so I was being facetious.

Tell you what though, what if.. hear me out.. what if what happened is there was a technological singularity, say around 2012 and the world of the film is a simulation maintained by super advanced AIs (the titular 'children if men'.) and derived from media created in the period immediately before the onset of exponential AI development The main limitation of the simulation being that new humans can't be created.

There aren't really enough many 3-year-olds making dubstep, though - Baby Diego would've grown up with a whole generation above him making music (and the ones above that, as well - more so if they're not making babies!)

Lol it's a very bad, boring piece if you know even some of the terrain.

And in fact covid has actually made capitalism seem incredibly fragile, it's end closer and possible, and the last general election and movements around the world show that people are thinking of alternatives. The New Statesman plays it's own part in demonising and talking down these movements so ofc it will write about clapped out thrash like Children of Men.

"Cuarón was inspired by the 20th-century film theorist André Bazin, for whom fast editing diminishes a scene “from something real into something imaginary”."

Like this...doesn't sound right? Bazin was writing (and died) before the really long takes became a thing later in the 60s and then 70s Euro film? And he was more for backing a kind of realism in filmmaking (from my fuzzy memory).

Lol it's a very bad, boring piece if you know even some of the terrain.

"bad, boring"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/18/toxic-chemicals-health-humanity-erin-brokovich

I heard a shocking factoid recently: an average human body today contains at least 500 chemicals that did not exist before WWII.

At this point it's hard for me to read an article like that and muster the sense of panic she is trying to evoke. The future looks bleak for humanity, but it would be poetic justice that if we wiped ourselves out before we could finish making the world uninhabitable for most other species.

This film...

London 2027 in Children of Men is a functional society - you still get a coffee, go to work on the bus, put a bet on the dogs, go to the pub - but it’s not one you’d want to live in. pic.twitter.com/3T81bCyl68

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) November 3, 2022

"Cuarón was inspired by the 20th-century film theorist André Bazin, for whom fast editing diminishes a scene “from something real into something imaginary”."

Like this...doesn't sound right? Bazin was writing (and died) before the really long takes became a thing later in the 60s and then 70s Euro film? And he was more for backing a kind of realism in filmmaking (from my fuzzy memory).

― xyzzzz__, Monday, August 3, 2020 6:05 AM (two years ago)

yeah, my fuzzy memory aligns with yours ... it would probably be more accurate to say that Cuaron was inspired by 60s/70s filmmakers whose long takes were partially a response to the theories of Bazin (e.g. the Godard traffic jam scene in Weekend)

Bazin did celebrate long takes, but he was probably thinking about "master shots" rather than the sometimes showy takes of later filmmakers. It wasn't the length of the take or the impressive camera movements that was important to him:

I would even say that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope could just as easily have been edited in classical fashion, whatever artistic importance one may legitimately attach to his approach. On the other hand, it would be unthinkable for the famous seal-hunting scene in Nanook of the North not to show us, in the same composition, the hunter, the hole in the ice and the seal.

All the news about Manston has had me thinking about the Bexhill scenes in CoM over the last few days.

Yup

Saw this for the first time last night. I'm afraid, when everyone stops fighting as he carries the baby out of the building, I was unable to get this bit from The Day Today "War" out of my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRjtVdWvNzY

Watched this again tonight. It's got this weird time-breaking element to it - like it's beamed in from some hidden decade between the 90s and 00s but also could have been made last year. It continues to be horribly prescient, of course. God, I watched the last twenty minutes through a cloud of tears.

1) I have been rude about Clive Owen's acting on another thread. He's fucking *perfect* in this. Role of a lifetime.
2) Owen should have been nominated for awards, and so should Michael Caine.

Watched it again last week. Agree with all the above. What a film.

I keep thinking about Pam Ferris's character. She's kind of slapstick in her way, clumsy, out of place but her monologue in the abandoned school gives her character so much dignity. I love how it's not rushed and comes pretty close to the end of the film, the monologue blooming backwards into her character and actions. Her sacrifice for Kee is so beautiful.

I don't really know what to make of the vaguely 'Eastern religious' stuff associated with her. She and Kee mumble 'om mani padme hum' in the back of the car. And is that tai-chi she's doing outside the school? Fwiw, 'shantih shantih shantih' are the final three words of the credits (could be a nod to The Waste Land; might just be a final message of peace from the Vedas).

This and AI are two big budget/big swing early '00s sci-fi that can reduce me to puddles just thinking about them. I have to be judicious with rewatches.

This and AI are two big budget/big swing early '00s sci-fi that can reduce me to puddles just thinking about them. I have to be judicious with rewatches.

Thanks, phone. This is the future we are living in.

her monologue in the abandoned school gives her character so much dignity

i randomly put on 28 Days Later and early on there's a scene shortly after Murphy's character gets out of the hospital, where a woman is telling him about the events that had occurred while he was in a coma and they did the same slow pan over to her while she spoke as that scene. feel like CoM had to have been directly inspired by 28 Days for that monologue scene.
not being a film school student, i realize there's a good chance this kind of thing has been done 1000 times before and since - but the similarities did jump out at me

And is that tai-chi she's doing outside the school?

Outside Jasper's, but yeah - I think she's drawn as "well-spoken but a bit of a hippie", which is definitely some type - when she's taken off the bus she's praying to 'the Lord' to take care of Kee - not sure how much weight to put on whether the loud exhortation to 'St Gabriel' is just acting a a distraction. She's quite well dressed when Theo first gets into the car with her - the crusty look for the rest of the film is because those clothes end up with Julian's blood on them.

Best dystopian movie

i agree. I can’t think of one that bests it.

Yeah, the coolest thing about that bit -- thematically, visually, generally -- was that the guy sits and eats lunch with Guernica hanging over the table.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 18 January 2007 22:41 (eighteen years ago) link

Absurd update to this: I was recently walking past an apartment I used to live in, and was shocked to see through the window that whoever lives there now has a gigantic print of Guernica over the dining area. Imagine my surprise reading an 18-year-old thread and seeing that I once found this deranged enough in fiction

It all comes true in the end. (Also hi there!)