Children of men is a very good movie, I have just come home from the cinema where I watched it with my brother and his girlfriend and I could not believe that this great movie gets so little attention. Therefore I decided to write this review of the movie children of men. This movie is about a guy named Dylan who lives in a post world collapse London.
You see the women of the world got sterile 18 years ago and this situation have lead to chaos, war and anarchy in the whole world. Only Britain have some semblance of civilization left and it is cracking at the seems by the pressure of the limitless numbers of refugees coming in from Europe and the rest of the world. Dylan lives in this sci fi world and our first impression of him marks him as rather bland and a little boring.
This is good because it gives us time to look at the world.
Dylan gets involved in an attempt to smuggle a girl somewhere and during the action filled journey we learn to know about him and his background the story never slows down because you never know what will happen next, so a lot of the choices that the characters make about Dylan makes a lot more sense when you think about it. This movie combines depth with action so flawlessly that I did not see all the red threads and seems before driving home.
But the movie which deals with the main characters being hunted most of the time rolls on relentlessly and I was more than satisfied just getting entertained by the twist and turns in this action thriller. (Okay so it's mostly action)
The movie is a work of art in its filming set and choice of background music. The future London looks very realistic and quite literally oozes atmosphere.
The camera work is very clear and uncompromising in it's showing of gritty violence but the documentary look is just that: a look. We get panorama view, close ups and mood filled location overview almost all the time. The movie is very clear and detailed and nothing is glossed over, it's almost stylistic in its showing of this apocalyptic world, and it's the fact that it manage to combine this style with the fast-paced urban grim and gritty documentary look that really impresses me.
This movie should be seen for its great camera work alone if you are interested in that aspect of movies.
Soundwise its also good, but the background music is so flawlessly integrated into the movie (and there is not much of it) so it does not stand out much. But it definitely is good at bringing the movie out of the screen and that is what movie music is about.
Sound in this movie is excellent and it needs to be since sound is very important here in this movie. As the main characters are chased we hear what they hear and since we are audience we can guess what it was just a mini-second before them. This works really well for making me feel for the protagonists and keeps the pace of the film, the sound work is crystal clear and I did not miss a thing, we hear it like the main characters hear it, it's just that great!
The filming, sound picture and music does a great job of telling this story and what an exiting story it is. It has it's dull moments mostly in the beginning of the film but when it takes off it takes off. This is not one of those action movies that have the coolest scene in the beginning to make you sit down and not leave and then just fill up the rest of the movie with some filler.
As the pace of the movie increases it becomes clear to us that Dylan is a regular guy not an incredibly strong of either limb or mind but he is chosen by faith or circumstance to fill the role of hero and protector and when I figured out the why of why he was chosen it was a real "aha!" experience for me and it was a theme of the movie all the time. I am impressed with how many threads this movie manages to weave together even though all I see at first is the excellent fabric it created.
The Dylan character however is a regular man and as such he is no whiny looser either. Yes you heard me this character is neither cool and strong nor a whiny weakling who lets others do the hard work for him. Just that character alone in these action filled scenes makes the story cool.
When I come to characters I would like to take a minute to speak of the characters you meet in this movie before I move on to the actor performance. The characters here in the movie is plentiful and they are all rather interesting even non speaking small parts are done with character, small details that gives them and the insane world they live in plausibility and depth. There are even a nod to the sci fi genre there: a rebel leader is named Luke even this name gives the role he plays greater depth and it say something about rebels and rebel leaders in general, a point which I feel was high time somebody said.
There are no clear cut morality or bad guys or good guys in this film such are the complexity of the characters and yet there are clear morality in the film brought to us by the very same characters and the fact that the filmmakers managed to mix these two outlooks are amazing.
Lets move on to the actor's performance they are all great nobody really stand out because they are all so believable so you don't really notice they are acting, this straightforward style really lends itself well to both the epic and the documentary styles or rather the melding of these two styles the movie is made in. However here is is the movie's weak spot one of the characters are a quirky guard, he is so quirky in fact that he is just a little bit less believable than the rest of the world also there is maybe two or three minutes to much focus on a old hippie character, he is just not that interesting as the movie tries to make him be however both the actors are good and they each deliver a very important scene in the movie on separate occasions.
This movie works not only as a gloomy sci-fi apocalypse movie with heavy thoughts and morale. But also as a cool action movie. It surprises me that this movie have not gotten more attention it is a great movie and deserve to bee seen.
If you like end of the world scenarios, war, action and zombies this is the movie for you! I must say however that this movie should only bee seen by people 18 years old or older not only for the violence but also because of the rather heavy themes and the cold, hard, long and uncompromising look at humanity under pressure.
Okay so there are no zombies in the movie but there is a couple of scenes that gave me the zombie movie feeling.
I recommend this movie fully!
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