Children of Men
Bleak. Bleak. Bleak. Bleak. Bleak. Bleak. Oh, and did I say bleak?
Where did the fashion start that the future was all washed out colour? We don't owe it to Bladerunner, because the colours in Bladerunner are quite rich, even if seen through a filter of rain.
I have to admit that I've never read the P.D James novel on which this movie was based. My colleague the expert on dystopias has and commented that the film-makers had got the atmosphere and the look but lost the ideas. Certainly I didn't get much in the way of ideas from this movie. WTF was it about? I mean really? Beyond the obvious extrapolations of "gee if we carry on the way we're going the world is going to be just like this and it will suck."
I don't know what Julianne Moore was doing in it. Blink and you would miss her. Pam Ferris had more to do, really, which would have pleased my mother, who used to like her in "The Darling Buds of May" and "Where the Heart Is." I love Clive Owen, and he was looking handsome, his large face smudged and wide-eyed and solemn. He was largely expressionless, except for a few minutes with Michael Caine when he did crack a smile.
But quite honestly I didn't have much sense of who was doing what to whom. Nor did I much care. It was brilliantly done. And, yes, it was a very bleak vision of the future. Okay. We got that much.
One good thing - there may not be babies in the future, but there are dogs. There were dogs everywhere, and none of them died.
Where did the fashion start that the future was all washed out colour? We don't owe it to Bladerunner, because the colours in Bladerunner are quite rich, even if seen through a filter of rain.
I have to admit that I've never read the P.D James novel on which this movie was based. My colleague the expert on dystopias has and commented that the film-makers had got the atmosphere and the look but lost the ideas. Certainly I didn't get much in the way of ideas from this movie. WTF was it about? I mean really? Beyond the obvious extrapolations of "gee if we carry on the way we're going the world is going to be just like this and it will suck."
I don't know what Julianne Moore was doing in it. Blink and you would miss her. Pam Ferris had more to do, really, which would have pleased my mother, who used to like her in "The Darling Buds of May" and "Where the Heart Is." I love Clive Owen, and he was looking handsome, his large face smudged and wide-eyed and solemn. He was largely expressionless, except for a few minutes with Michael Caine when he did crack a smile.
But quite honestly I didn't have much sense of who was doing what to whom. Nor did I much care. It was brilliantly done. And, yes, it was a very bleak vision of the future. Okay. We got that much.
One good thing - there may not be babies in the future, but there are dogs. There were dogs everywhere, and none of them died.