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

That dynamic has very little to do with this film. Julian's death isn't a picking-off thing: it's a basic plot activator, because so long as she is alive, she's the person who's planning and commanding the whole activity; her death is like the murder of authority after which all descends into chaos, which strikes me as both a fine narrative activator and well in keeping with the whole system of the film. Jasper and Miriam's exits are calculated to produce a whole different effect than the "Villain Grows Closer" formula, one that's less about danger than about sacrifice in the service of, umm, a child -- that strikes me as normal narrative and thematic building more than the application of "formula." (And actually the hint of "we're in real shit now" upon Miriam's exit was fairly effective for me.) Theo's death in the end doesn't fit any "picking the characters off one by one" film formula I'm aware of -- it'd be more obviously in the "hero expires with satisfaction of having achieved objective" camp -- and in combination with the Russians getting shot, it seems to underscore something very different from the picked-off arrangement.

My real bone here, though, is that something like the "hero expires with satisfaction of having achieved objective" trope is not just automatically a formula and therefore a bad thing. It's a building block of countless stories since the whole beginning of stories. It reads as a "formula" when it doesn't belong, when it's unearned, where it's trying to remind you of the idea of "hero expires etc." rather than establishing that itself. (Cf using that string theme from "Romeo & Juliet" to shorthand "and now they're falling in love.") This doesn't mean that "hero expires" or "they fall in love" can't be legitimate and well-handled parts of a functioning narrative. Some of what you're saying here sounds to me a little like saying "that's so lame how this story conceals the conventional fact that they fall in love" -- to me, when well-handled, that's not "concealing," it's just using a basic narrative building block in a way that escapes the formulaic way it's usually, done. Which is a good thing.

Another way of putting this: when Caine goes down doing the "pull my finger" routine from the opening, that fits a well-known story convention -- character goes out defiantly doing the same stuff that made us like him. But there's a reason people like that convention, and depending on how a film treats it, it can read as either succumbing to lame formula or just effectively pushing the emotional button that gets pushed when we see this sort of thing happen.

xpost -- Shakey, are you keeping the air strikes in account?

And now...your moment of zen.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/im52xmax/skowie8F07-047.jpg

x-post Nabisco you make a pretty decent point, though I think you're so determined to protect the basic tenets of narrative (which I am not challenging) that you're not acknowledge the presence of cliche at all (just as I'm undoubtedly overstating it on the relative scale of cinema today).

i guess i just dont get the fuss :/

x-post to Nabs.

Ryan, what do you mean when you say the movie "was sort of morose without any intelligence and lacking really anything to get worked up about"? Did you perhaps see "The Cleaner" by mistake???

hmm you have a good point there but assuming characters get killed isn't the same as showing them being picked off - in terms of supporting-cast-whose-deaths-you-don't-see I was thinking of the rich dude and the gypsy. Marika (sp?) may have been my favorite character.

I think Ryan is getting at part of the problem I have with these types of movies, which is that the second you start taking on some political pretensions (which it'd be really facetious to claim this movie didn't), I start holding it to a higher standard than I do, say, Crank.

Ryan I think somebody else linked to an interview where they said the blood on the lens thing just happened by accident and they decided to carry on with it.

Yeah, by someone WHO IS BATSHIT CRAZY.

Sure it is! Speculative fiction, anyway. It's much more sci-fi then, say, Alien, which is just a horror movie in space.

dune and star wars and logan's run are all totally pastoral you senile doosh

TOMBOT, the desert is not the countryside.

*the exact moment everyone stops listening to what I have to say about movies

I get the idea I'm just gibbering in the corner while you lot talk seinsibly.