DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER TWENTY
The dystopia film, by its nature, is inherently conservative. Having seen a change for the worse, one walks out of the theatre with renewed faith in their own world. This is true even for cautionary tales like "Children of Men": by showing the end of the path, they make the path itself look good. We can't keep doing what we're doing, they warn... but oh, for the good old days!
Not that Alfonso Cuaron's film is merely sci-fi camp. For one thing, it's a looker, shot with sumptuous long takes in a quasidocumentary style. Sets, and action set-pieces, bristle with detail. Tech both high (eerily real CG) and low (shaky hand-held cameras) is used to its maximum; artistically, it's an ambitious piece of work, and creates a convincing bombed-out future. Its stars are unwashed and unglamorous -- even if their lines are of the "at least with a hangover I'd feel something" variety -- and its politics refreshingly cynical.
With its illegal immigrant heroine, Jihadists fighting side by side with Germans and Poles, and Homeland Security bad guys, the film is a stake through the heart of white racism and nationalism. This film isn't with the terrorists -- insurgency groups are shown as vicious and divisive, and hinder our heroes as much as they help -- but it sure as hell isn't with us, and it lets us know it. A scene in a retired journalist's home sports "Impeach Bush" and "Bring The Troops Home" stickers, not as signs of a vanished idealism but as warnings gone unheeded.
At the same time, the politics are muddled by religious allegory. The film's dependence on a savior figure (the heroine's child) undercuts it: for all the hardships our characters endure, in the end, rather than having to find hope they are simply given hope. That's very disempowering. Early in the film, a propaganda piece claims "only Britain soldiers on" -- do we not need to make our own meaning in life, and soldier on? Must we have a divine (at any rate, inexplicable) intervention to keep from destroying ourselves?
The Battersea Power Station segment, with the art collector and his son, is also problematic. In a film about acceptance of diversity, it seemed to play on prejudice: the old boy (pardon the pun) is a cartoon image of autism, his father a stereotype of the fussy homosexual. Neurological and sexual "defects" are brought on by our decadent technological society, the film seems to be saying.
Children Of Men works best as a reverse-Lord Of The Flies scenario, with inverted moral: when children are absent, adults are beastly to each other. Stanislav Grof would say that war is an ersatz form of childbirth, its explosive energies an attempt at reliving unfinished natal trauma. Certainly this film shows what, left to their own devices, the over-twenty population might give birth to.
― Polyencephalic (Syra), Friday, 5 January 2007 03:58 (seventeen years ago) link
― Polyencephalic (Syra), Friday, 5 January 2007 04:01 (seventeen years ago) link
― Sam Grayson (Sam Grayson), Tuesday, 9 January 2007 09:45 (seventeen years ago) link
Thats an intersting perspective. Perhaps the film could have been clearer on where it stands in terms or religion. I found that the impact of the childs presence was not so much underpinned by its miraculousness, but rather the extreme nature of the scarcity of its kind - which entailed an amplified appreciation for its preciousness and qualities as a baby. I never got the impression the child's gravitas had much to do with any reacting characters religious beliefs. But of course you could aptly call it the 'miracle baby'. Although I don't think its birth was all that inexplicable compared to the infertility idea. Wouldn't it just be considered a likely albeit extremely rare deviation.
The child was posistioned as a saviour, but I found it more interesting and compelling than your run of the mill "divine" saviour. It didn't prevent the killing, it briefly halted it. I never got the impression it simply delivered the characters from their hardships - it created a few though. I also assumed there would be much more to hardships to endure long after the closing scene.
I felt that as a source of hope the child was the opposite of disempowering. I think it represented a returning of power.
― Sam Grayson (Sam Grayson), Tuesday, 9 January 2007 12:49 (seventeen years ago) link
― Josh Anderson (Voltero), Tuesday, 9 January 2007 18:18 (seventeen years ago) link
― Peter Chung (Peter Chung), Friday, 26 January 2007 00:05 (seventeen years ago) link
Hehe, I still haven't seen children of men, but that was pretty funny.I don't know why, but it also bugs me when miracles happen in movies which are attributed to the great and undying spirit of man, or the work of a mysterious divine like agent. I guess it kind of seems like a copout. There's no quicker way to make all of your characters three dimensional than to have them helpless before an unseen force. Real people deal with real problems in real ways. It's all too complicated to just be summed up by the word "mystery."But then I'm ranting.
― Josh Aldridge (Josh Aldridge), Friday, 26 January 2007 07:09 (seventeen years ago) link
"Pan's Labyrinth" has some examples of this perspective. The natural percieved by the characters as the supernatural.
I also don't understand the critique about the "battersea power station" segment. I didn't see the theme of accepting diversity among the film's core themes; I didn't see the artist and the child as negative stereotypes; I even missed that the artist was homosexual. I thought that these two characters represented different perspectives on what the legacy of mankind would be, philosophical outlooks on how the end would be approached by some, specifically the afluent. The boy had a "fiddling while the titanic sinks", vibe. Something that I admired about the character of the man with the irish wolf hound is that it seemed that he was really in touch with what he valued as the legacy of the human race. Eternal Values. Maybe I missed that part. What else did you see, Polyencephalic, to make you feel this way?
― Ronald Wimberly (SouJouBou), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 20:22 (seventeen years ago) link
Ronald, would you be able to elaborate on what your saying?
― Sam Grayson (Sam Grayson), Thursday, 8 February 2007 11:55 (seventeen years ago) link
― Ronald Wimberly (SouJouBou), Sunday, 11 February 2007 04:37 (seventeen years ago) link
I agree with what Peter said about the films greatest value being in the act of viewing it.
After seeing it and thinking about its ideas, i think the film works, without any particular religious or political standpoint, as a reasonably valid and interesting critique of humanity.
People often become so enamoured of their beliefs and positions that they will do terrible things to theselves just to uphold them. Childeren of men uses the "don't know what you've got till its gone" syndrome to show that just about all people, despite their differing convictions, can agree that childeren and the ability to give birth to them, are important things.
I'm not sure about the Lord of the Files comparison, I think the films suggests that people are always beastly to each other, and without the ability to procreate that behaviour would catch up very quickly.
― Sam Grayson (Sam Grayson), Sunday, 11 February 2007 12:58 (seventeen years ago) link
― Adambrowne, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 09:36 (seventeen years ago) link