Intelligent beautiful film making

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2006)

The best film I've seen in years & certainly the best British film I think I've ever seen. Although at times it plays like a video game (Half-Life 2 anyone?) the sheer nerve of attempting those prolonged tracking shots (the car attack, the street fight) & pulling them off had my jaw dropping. This is something you could watch again & again & still pick up something new. Dystopia is writ large & seems to be something British film does well (V For Vendetta, Land Of The Blind, Brazil) but I've never seen London this bleak (even 28 Days Later had an undercurrent of hope). The attention to detail astounds - even a casual shot of a cat looking out of a window contains a full-pitched battle. The ambient noise seeps through from the buzzing of fluorescent lights to the remnants of tinnitus from that first calamitous explosion to the pervasive farmyard noises that bathe the refugee camp. The use of 'Homeland Security', Theo's 'Olympics 2012' shirt, Battersea power station complete with Pink Floyd flying pigs - every shot contained in-jokes & visual ideas that made me fear for blinking. Everything is washed out, polluted, black & bleak. The intermittent (occasionally extreme) violent acts seem out of place but keep you paying attention. I can't remember the last time I watched a film and really couldn't take my eyes off the screen for a second. If you like intelligent cynical science-fiction (and what else is good sci-fi about if not dystopia?) I cannot recommend this film highly enough. And all this from the pen of a Baroness, member of the House Of Lords - with an establishment figure like that, who needs the revolution!