Children of Men September 26, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : London,Reviews , trackbackI’m having a busy couple of weeks and sadly this blog has suffered a little as I concentrate on setting up the marketing effort for a change to my business, finish off my current contract and prepare for a wedding and short holiday in France. I did manage to find time to get to the cinema on Saturday evening, and saw the deeply disturbing distopia, Children of Men.
Set in the near future, in an instantly recognisable but considerably grimmer (and grimier) London, no babies have been born for 18 years. Society is slowly collapsing in despair, as cults thrive and a group of terrorist / activists try to stir up ‘the uprising’. A Minister has taken over Battersea Power Station and turned it into a private apartment while outside the Clean Air Act has clearly been repealed.
In the midst of all this Our Hero, played by Clive Owen, survives a nearby bombing and is kidnapped by the ‘terrorist’ organisation supposedly responsible. Its leader is his long-lost partner, and she has a mission for him – to take a young woman to meet a boat on the south coast.
Violence is gritty and realistic in the way that British movies portray it – when someone’s head is smashed with a brick, you can almost feel it. The squalor of the concentration camp on the coast filled with illegal immigrants is palpable. The contrast between the urban scenes and the clean, green and pleasant countryside, perhaps recovering as the number of people dwindles, cries out ‘England’.
The star is the setting, the scene that embodies the themes of dispair and decay. And although the plot presents hope, it is faint and unlikely.
This is not a movie to see if you want to be cheered up, or to relax. But it is probably one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and highly recommended.
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Children of Man was fantastic – I especially liked recognising the grim, gritty bits of London and they do pretty much look like that in real life. Normally when you see places you know they have filmed on a sunny day and wound the contrast up a bit – here the reverse is true with stunning results.
Apparently parts of it were filmed in Argentina – presumably the more wartorn bits at the end.
As ever, fantastic performance by Michael Caine.