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

There's a line about them being a collective of scientists working on the infertility problem, right? I thought that was enough. Obviously they're the ones to get this miracle woman to, for study.

I didn't have a clear answer when my friend asked me afterwards why they didn't let the government know. Just because she's an immigrant? Surely the government would value a baby more than they would hate an immigrant, right? Since the hatred of immigrants stemmed from a loss of hope, at least indirectly, and this baby would be hope, and Britain would have something suddenly that no other country did. Right? That's a great deal of hand to have.

I dunno. Apparently not.

A lot of the "but this wasn't explained" questions seem a little weird to me, especially when it comes to the stuff that totally was explained: e.g., going to the government is precisely what Owen is suggesting in the kitten-claws bit! To which everyone responds that they'll take away the baby and deport Ki, which she and Miriam are against for obvious moral/personal reasons, and the Fish are pushing because of their own baby-having agenda.

When this ended and the title flashed back up, someone behind me snorted derisively, and then, when the title gave way to credits, two other people snorted exactly the same way. I'm a tad mystified by this: it's laid out pretty clearly that the scope of the thing is "we must get her to the boat," so ... what, were they hoping for an extra fifteen minutes of montage where it's all like "hooray, we have sorted out the baby problem, and everything is going back to normal now?"

P.P.S.: As far as Christian overtones go, I feel like this was fairly light on them, considering how much the scenario jumps up and down screaming "hello I am totally wide open for as much Christian-overtone pushing as you could possibly want to do" (and considering the director was born / raised / educated in Mexico, where surely Virgin Mary-tales are going to loom large in your experience and imagination no matter where you wind up in terms of religion).

I didn't have a clear answer when my friend asked me afterwards why they didn't let the government know. Just because she's an immigrant?

Yeah, I think it was pretty clear that both baby and mother would get the E.T. treatment.

Another one of the million things I liked about this film was the idea that, like in Day of the Triffids, there was the feeling that this was just one of many stories, and that there were other people also trying to get pregnant women, or possibly pregnant women, to the Human Project.

There's also a little mean bit of me that likes to think that the Human Project is just as bad and will also give them the E.T. treatment. Because I like bleak films.

I missed that line of dialogue. Yeah, that makes perfect sense, then.

*Okay, so I somehow missed the Julian/Theo dialogue on the bus about Dylan 1.0. This was a very well-played, heartbreaking moment, that was really integral to understanding a lot of what was to come (in particular, why she came to him in the first place).

*The musical score, I realized this time, was very integrated - all the incidental music was mixed as to actually seem part of the events of the film, only once really did a piece of music stand out as not originating from someplace on-screen ("Court of the Crimson King", which they may have been listening to on Big Important Guy's car stereo). Every other piece of music came from SOMEWHERE - Jasper's home stereo, various car stereos, drums and other music panned hard right or left as though it was being performed on the street just off-screen. Really added to the immersiveness (is this even a real word?) of the film.

There's at least one more minutes long single-shot to the ambush and the Bexhill shot I hadn't caught on to the first time - that amazing barefoot jump-start escape from the Fishes' compound.

Well, granted, one of the many things the film leaves outside its scope is why, precisely, the government would be more committed to its deportation system than to fertility -- it's a little bit handwavy on that front. But even leaving aside deportation, it seems completely reasonable to assume they wouldn't just leave the first live birth in years to be raised by one of the refugees they've put so much energy into demonizing. And for Miriam, Ki, and Theo, at least, the idea of the government taking the baby and packing Ki off to a lab somewhere is just as problematic.

It also seems entirely possible that the Fish have just successfully scared everyone off putting any trust in the government, as their own agenda dictates, which seems like the kind of thing that might be laid out in more detail in novel form?

In any case, the amount of stuff that goes unexamined in this is definitely okay with me -- probably a good thing -- because we're kept so tightly in the immediate experience and concerns of the story. (In a case like this, there's not even much reason to think the characters can divine the government's motivations any more than we can.) And the story itself seems entirely coherent. The fact that there are things we don't entirely understand about the outside world -- things that seem like rumors and headlines that float momentarily by -- seems fairly appropriate to the setting, right?

I love the bit where the Fish deny involvement in the bombing from the beginning of the film, blaming the government, but as you learn more about them it becomes clear that it could have just as easily been them.

I was wondering if the initial infertility was caused by a genetically-engineered virus that targeted immigrants/third world that misfired and targeted everyone. Something similar to what took place in Frank Herbert's The White Plague.

This was a bit obtrusive to me, too. It seemed very out of character for either the driver or Theo to play loud music on the drive.

I hope that the Final Cut of Blade Runner gets rid of the explanatory text at the beginning, the same way the Director's Cut got rid of the voiceover.

the large amount of unexplained stuff is one of the movie's strongest points. thank GOD they didn't explain the infertility thing with some dumb gov't-weapons-project-gone-wrong thing.

will this depress me?

b/c the state of the world is pretty depressing lately
and i'm not even really a depressive person. i don't want all flowers and sunshine and lalala by any means, but i do want, er, hope, or something. (i love 'bladerunner,' i love 'aliens', if that matters in answering)

it's really really excellent.

"The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder."

It's the kind of misspeaking that even GW couldn't pull off. Obviously he meant that police preserve ORDER, but this drooling moron couldn't wrap his tiny brain around even a single twist in the English language. All he knew was corruption and strong-arming, and during the '68 Convention in Chicago that he presided over, he proved not only that he was a moron, but that his police force was as moronic as he was. Not by choice, necessarily. Just following orders. Things get out of hand? Whoop 'em. There are pictures of streets (that I've lived on) after the 68 convention, and they don't look a lot different from some streets in this movie. Trash and crap and various detrius lining both sides of the street, with the middle path clear. In the movie, the implication (I guess) was that people walk there all the time. In the photos, it was more likely because of liberal use of firehoses. Hm. What's the difference?

Anyway.

So for anyone who thinks this movie is in any way implausible...

As far as plausible real-world resemblances, there was actually a total of maybe ten seconds where it seemed a bit too much -- I appreciated how everything was visually modeled on real events and presumably news footage, but there were a couple details that leaped past that and become so much the news footage that they broke the spell. E.g., the refugees marching and chanting "Allahu akbar" = totally right and vivid. The fact that they're carrying a body on a plank in Palestinian martyr style = too recognizable, as an image, to keep me in the film's world, as opposed to thinking about the real one.

That's obviously a minor point, and I guess -- to be inconsistent -- I didn't really mind the pointed placement of the Abu Ghraib hooded man in the entrance, which the same sort of real-world spell-breaking. I guess it's just the difference between feeling like those things ring true in the world of the film and actually being reminded of the world outside the theater? Which this film was 99% totally on the right side of: the fact that the tanks at the end could remind you of Beirut or Groszny or the West Bank or nearly wherever is a good example of it working seamlessly.

I mean, I think it says a lot that you walk out of this thinking about the world of the film, and not thinking (just for example) "yeah, the situation of the refugees is clearly analogous to the situation of Palestinians," or anything remotely along those lines, even though it would be fairly easy to do.

(P.S. One of the many ways in which the not-knowing-details is fascinating: it's totally unclear what the refugee/deportation policy is, to the point where I kept wondering if Julianne Moore was with the Fish in part because she was American!)

roffle

(P.S. One of the many ways in which the not-knowing-details is fascinating: it's totally unclear what the refugee/deportation policy is, to the point where I kept wondering if Julianne Moore was with the Fish in part because she was American!)

I thought that was blatantly why she was with them (in addition to the character's personality and personal history)! They were exporting Germans left and right, why wouldn't they export Americans?

(My favorite early moment in the movie is the German woman complaining about being locked up with the big black man.)