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.