IHAO on ... Children of Men

Man oh man oh man oh man oh man.

This is the story of a man.  A man who used to be a father, but is now an emotionless (in general) protagonist.  A man who was a political activist, and still believes all those things, but is no longer one, because of reasons.  A man whose father and mother were political activists, as well as his former wife.  A man who is the only one that can save a woman, any woman, because this movie kills women and blames them for everything as easily as you or I spread butter on toast.

I found this movie insulting, boring, and lazy.  It is also a pretty well made movie.  It is not too often that I can say a thing like that.  This film, I can very much see people loving it, because it has some uniqueness to it.  But so many choices are made that are pretentious at best and masturbatory at worst.  Clive Owen is a terrible leading man, and Hollywood figured that out basically right after this movie.  Alfonso Cuaron is a talented director, but really really heavy-handed all movie.  He brings up many many themes, from feet, to immigration stuff, to racial war, to sexist stuff, and all of it is added to the film from its source material.

The actual plot of the movie goes something like this: the youngest person on earth was just killed.  For some reason unexplained, no children have been born in eighteen years.  This lead to everywhere but Britain being the worst place ever and Britain becoming a semi-military state of anti-immigration something something.  Whatever, Clive Owen shows up and has to help this political group smuggle a girl out of the country.  That girl is pregnant.  How, why, none of that matters.  Oh, the political group also double crosses everyone, and is bad guys.  Then they race to get to rendezvous point.

This movie is a very well made.  Cinematography, music, editing, all of that is well done.  But it just has so many terrible themes throughout.  All the religious imagery, all of the racist imagery, and all the sexist stuff!  I mean, the whole movie blames and kills off women, CONSTANTLY.  Here, here's an example: the thing that is making all the world unable to have children, in the movie it is 100% blamed on women.  Think about that.  That might not be immediately a problem, but combine that with the way women characters are treated in the film, it is really kind of harsh.  Whenever a director makes a film, they make choices.  Everything you see on the screen is a choice that was made.  So for there to be so much racial agenda pushing, like the Muslims all being crazy militants but the only immigrants who are, or all the religious stuff, or the weird foot theme that went through the middle section of the movie.

I don't like this movie.  I could continue to list more and more things I hated about the movie.  I can say some good things, like the one-ers (shots done all in one take) are impressive, but basically unnecessary with no purpose narratively beyond the fact that they did them.  See, even then I just said it as a bad thing.  Bah.

Grade: B--