I just watched Children of Men with Carrie. I’ve been asked if I’ve seen this movie by approximately every single person who’s ever played Shock: and for good reason. But I’d been avoiding it. I was avoiding it because I knew it was going to be good, but the Grid of the movie was all stuff that I felt so strongly about, I was worried that it would come up short of what might have been impossibly high standards.
The Shock is that humans can no longer conceive. In the course of the movie, you discover that it happened across the world over the course of a couple of months. It has no apparent cause.
The Issues are Immigration Policy and Terrorism, synthesized nicely into several threads of xenophobia. It’s very much a post-9/11 movie, but it’s also a movie made by a Mexican director for an American audience.
If you know me, you know that this is a perfect brew of fears for me.
The movie didn’t disappoint me. It’s full of humans acting very, very badly toward each other from the institutional to the personal level in ways you can understand. The world is in despair. You hear the sentiments of the movie echoing your friends, your enemies, talking heads on Fox News, crazy people on your favorite internet fora. At one point, it makes you complicit in a racist statement and then shows you that it was you making that assumption, not the film, not the situation. This character’s humanity is in the balance exactly as much as any other character’s, and it’s defined by their actions and desires, not their obvious otherness.
It’s a sad movie that doesn’t blink. At one point, while watching it, my body physically hurt from the tension.
All your points are right on, but I was also very taken by the technical mastery of the film. The long takes, the color palettes, the unflinching grimness of every scene.
Yeah, actually, the Minutiæ of the movie were right there, too. The updated double decker buses, the worn-out Citroên, the terrible realism of the fighting, the “I cut myself, so now I’m hurt for the rest of the movie” griminess.
The movie was almost uniformly yellowy green, which was neat. It gave a feeling of fluorescent lights, like the world had burned out. There were these moments where it wasn’t, and they were these brief moments of hope.
He’s a really good filmmaker. I wish he’d do more like this. His other films have been things I haven’t really cared about (with the exception of his producing of Pan’s Labyrinth, which, dude, wow.)
I’m a little sad to hear you say that, Y Tu Mama Tambien is excellent and surprising and Prisoner of Azkaban is the best of the Harry Potter movies.
And both the car ambush sequence and the running battle through the city battle are among the best action sequences I’ve seen in the post-Matrix world.
I think I need to see it again.
Plus Michael Caine!
The long takes are amazing; also the ‘future props’ that denote that WE ARE IN TEH FUTUAR! are handled as good or better than any other movie I’ve ever seen.
Yeah that’s basically one of my favorite movies.
Yeah, My sister said that Y Tu Mamá También was really good. I haven’t seen it, but she knows what.
The thing about The Prisoner of Azkaban is that Harry Potter just seems really fluffy to me. Like, it’s fun, and I like seeing weird things onscreen, but it doesn’t move me.
Agreed about those action sequences. Both are genuinely terrifying.
And Michael Caine’s ending is brilliant. I really couldn’t muster a joke through the entire movie, but for the one moment when he died, when I said, “He died as he lived.”