Children of Men

If you've seen the trailer for "Children of Men", you might think you've seen the film, I'm here to tell you that the trailer just sets the table, what follows is amazing journey of hope without any guarentee for a positive outcome, and the emotional wallop I experienced in the final minutes of the film just captivated me, and had I been watching this film on DVD at home, I think I would have cried for 10 minutes straight for an astoundingly haunting sequence (I won't say more, lest I spoil it even further), but I had to man-up in the theater and just settled for wiping streams of tears away from my eyes as the film concluded.

"Children of Men" features a dystopian look into a world without the ability to propagate human life. This is both harrowing on the surface and deeply and inherent tragic, but even on other metaphorical levels, the use of such a situation to examine the disappearance of the most basic things we humans take for granted, be they natural resources that get used up, or become unusable due to man's own design on this planet, it makes the viewer more appreciative of what we do have, and fearful of the possible damage we are doing to mother earth.

An infertile world population is a world without hope. After seeing this film, if you have children, you'd probably be even more grateful for being their parents, and if you don't have children, you might ask yourself why you don't have them.

Director Cuaron has this way of keeping the characters of his films firmly inhabiting in the worlds he creates, you see it in the little touches where scenes ends, but the characters, major and minor continue to move about and interact with one another organically and naturally. It's this kind of detail that grounds the characters in his stories as real people, not just characters of a story, but events that unfold before our very eyes for these characters. Utilizing a lot of hand-held footage to capture the subtle, the sublime, the fleeting intimate moments between friends, and the chaotic nature of being on the run, Cuaron plants the viewer right there with these people. The directing by Cuaron looks easy, but it's got such an assured hand behind every frame we see and hear.

Clive Owens as Theo absolutely nails his role, and is simply an everyman jaded by the current situation, but becomes a man again as he struggles to find safety and shelter for Kee, a woman inexplicably pregnant in a world that hadn't known of such a condition for over 18 years, with those years fostering despondency, despair and turmoil for countries all around the world. The rest of the cast is also very good, and serve the story well. The script is lean, and sets up the dystopia scenario well enough, without getting bogged down in details, and focuses on not how the situation came to be, but what would happen next.

I give it 4 stars, or a grade of A.

P.S. Loved the Pink Floyd nod with the "pig in the sky" shot.