Children of Men takes place in the near future, when all women have lost the ability to reproduce, and thus, the youngest people on earth are around the age of 18. All major cities have crumbled under societal chaos, save Britain, which remains. Britain is basically a huge Nazi, they allow Brits and only Brits to stay within the relatively safe area of the city, and ship out / deport all immigrants (former French or U.S. citizens, etc.) to concentration camps of sorts.
The main character, Theo, is played by Clive Owen. Through a series of events he ends up meeting a girl who is somehow actually pregnant, and the movie focuses on their attempt to escape Britain and the surrounding dangerously chaotic territories in attempts to reach a "new world" where a new civilization is trying to be made, as all hope has been given up on the known world recovering from the state that it's in.
Sounds like a cool movie, huh? Yeah, I thought so too. Unfortunately, it wasn't very impressive. Reading the intro paragraph, you might be interested in seeing this movie, but there are a few things that you should know before taking the time to watch it-- this is not a spoiler, just a general warning:
- By the end of the movie, you still don't know why women are not able to have babies.
- By the end of the movie, you do not find out why the ONE girl who is pregnant in the movie is capable of being pregnant.
- By the end of the movie, you'll ask yourself, "Why the hell was Julianne Moore even in this movie?"
- By the end of the movie, you will wonder, "What was the point of having a fat, nappie-haired lady dance around and chant like an Indian?"
- By the end of the movie, nothing is accomplished, you will realize that you have watched 2 hours of a pregnant black woman running through dirty cities, and you still don't know what the fuck is going to happen to the human race.
"Julianne, do you think that anyone will suspect that this movie goes no where and accomplishes nothing?"
"I don't know, Clive, all I know is that I should get a better agent, because I was in this movie for a total of about 5 fucking seconds."Clive Owen straight up pisses me off. He has all of this awesome aura of weird British drama about him, so you'd expect him to make a good actor-- instead, I've seen one good Clive Owen movie to date; Sin City. Everything else he's ever been in, as far as I know, has sucked, let's go down the list: King Arthur, Derailed, that one bank robbing movie with Densel Washington, bla bla bla. Foo-ie. Anyway, Clive Owen disappoints me because I see potential in his acting skills, and yet he has impressed me on so few occasions. That statement, in a nutshell, can also be applied to his latest movie as a whole, Children of Men.
Children of Men looked AMAZING when I saw the previews for it, I thought it was going to be some kind of huge, life altering, amazing British movie of awesomeness. Instead, it turned out to have a lot of strange style-istic shots and cool sets / locations, but a terrible plot, and no explanation of anything. It was one of those movies where they just plop you in a situation and don't explain anything, so that you go along the ride not knowing what's going on, but in order to pull that off, you have to actually conclude or explain something by the end of it, which this movie did not do. Disappointing and kind of a waste of time, which is sad, because I really wanted to like it.
Okay, so it wasn't a
terrible movie, but it should have been more and it wasn't, and in some ways, that's worse than it just sucking flat out. Nothing was explained, nothing was concluded, the movie starts no where and ends no where. It had such a cool theme going for it, but nothing is accomplished or gone over at all, which makes it impossible to identify with any of the characters, and I hate that, because given the awesome situation that the movie takes place in, I really wanted to identify with them. Again, not a terrible movie, but terribly disappointing.
See it if you're bored, but there are many better choices.
