Children Of Men

I finally saw it, and I liked it a lot. One of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. If you haven't seen it, stop reading now, and go see it.

***SPOILERS***

It's hard to know where to stop talking about what really works well here. The bleak future-world is well-realized; we're given enough of a glimpse of things to make it seem very fleshed out, with a myriad of things only hinted at.

In fact, one can say that about the whole film. We never learn a lot about the main characters, but the script does a good job revealing who they really are through action, while things keep moving briskly enough that we never find ourselves wondering about Kee's backstory.

The basic storyline is really very simple -- a man has to get a woman from point A to point B, with various people trying to stop them -- but the writers (there were a bunch of them, working from a novel by P.D. James) do a very good job weaving the tale out of a series of great sequences, finding good mini-dramas each step of the way while making the danger Theo and Kee are in feel plausible throughout.

And the setpieces -- wow. I have no idea how they did that single-shot sequence in the car, while the third act is amazing.

In the comments two posts down, there was some debate over the story logic, with a poster feeling that the main characters were able to get away from the bad guys too easily at times, and that Theo's motivation never made much sense because the baby wasn't that important.

I never felt this at all. The one scene he cites in which they don't shoot at the tires, it was clearly because they didn't want to risk anything happening to Kee.

As for the baby not being important, clearly there's the idea that the scientists might be able to use Kee or the baby to figure out why Kee is fertile, while the idea that Theo wouldn't just leave her to die somewhere is an important part of his growth as a character and establishing who he is.

Great movie.