Saturday, April 19, 2014
Children of Men
Children of Men is set in the year 2027, a new world where women have become infertile and science has failed to discover the reason. Illegal immigrants seek sanctity in the UK, but are rounded up like cattle and forced into the squalor and danger of refugee camps. The protagonist, Theo, works an unfulfilling office job in a constant state of misery, but due to a series of events finds himself reluctantly escorting a pregnant West African refugee, perhaps the only pregnancy after two decades, to escape to the sanctity of the elusive and almost mythical Human Project. The film is dystopic in the sense of there being an oppressive political regime in place with violence and depravity wide spread amongst the people. It is an interesting exploration of a possible future where the collapse of mankind is imminent and known consciously by all people, so questions what we have to live for in that context and how or even if we can retain our humanity. It asks if there is the possibility of hope in the face of overwhelming futility and despair. I really enjoyed the film for its wide and continuos single-take shots, conveying a sense of scale and magnitude just as successfully as the scenes depicted by the Romantic painters but in a contemporary sense.
Motifs: monochromatic palette, fog/smog, flames, graffiti, rubble, helicopters, cars, monolithic structures, fencing/barbed wire, guns, trees
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