Children of Men

Director: Alfonso Cuaron

"Children of Men" is simply the best science fiction film of the last ten years, bar nothing. It is thought provoking, intelligent, well acted, perfectly set, and as close to perfect as makes no difference. It is, in short, a masterpiece.

If I have a weakness in film it is for acting. It is my great and abiding love. Nothing makes me so happy as to see actual dead set acting in a film. If that happens, more than likely, I become a fan. "Children of Men" delivers on this front in simply amazing quantities. Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine were all exceptionally good, but more than that, they were exceptionally good within the parameters of an exceptionally good script. These two facts alone make the film stand tall on any stage in the land, and when one considers that it is a science fiction film, a genre filled to bursting with arrant crap, it makes "Children of Men" stand very tall indeed. I recommend seeing this one simply on the basis of the acting.

The script also is exceptional. It takes a very broad canvas and makes a highly believable future world and then, joy of joys peoples this world with people who behave in realistic ways, say realistic things, and add life to the ideas that drive the film. This, dear reader, is as rare as hen's teeth and I recommend "Children of Men" purely on the basis of the script.

The direction is truly nothing short of astonishing. Most films are made with a series of short, sometimes really short, "takes." Small set pieces of sometimes a minute, sometimes only several seconds. In these takes the actors act, the extras mill about, and the CGI gets added in. The shots are then cut together into a vast mosaic of shots that make up the film. In this age of "blizzard editing" sometimes the shots are less than a second long. "Children of Men" takes an utterly different approach. The shots are long, sometimes minutes at a time. The sets are huge, peopled with good extras, filmed with highly mobile hand held cameras, and acted in by stars. The effect is simply mesmeric. It is exactly as if the viewer has become an invisible eye that can float at will through a huge, real and utterly fascinating universe as history happens. Until you have seen 150 extras, a tank, 30 explosions, another 50 extras and the star all interact in what appears to be an unbroken two minute swooping shot of a full scale urban battle, you haven't seen what film is really capable of. When the same techniques are applied to a dinner party, or to a romantic scene in the same kind of setting, it is like being sucker punched by a wrecking ball. The fact that I cried like a baby during parts of this film is not that interesting to me. I have cried in movies before. In this one though, I came to on a number of occasions and literally found that my mouth was hanging open, slackly. That Alfonso Cuaron was capable of even conceiving the techniques in this film is worthy of the highest accolades, that he brought them off, is nothing short of astonishing, that he brought them off well, with real actors acting in the middle of the scenes is unbelieveable.

"Children of Men" is the real life blood of cinema. I doubt that Alfonso Cuaron will be getting much in the way of awards at the next Academy backslapping session but I will guarantee that the backslappers will be copying his work for the next few years, or maybe decades.

You like film? See this one ten times.

(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2007.