Not With A Whimper.

Rating: 4/10 (26 February 2013)

There's a remarkable long Steadicam shot in which the camera follows the hero, Clive Owen, through a raging battle -- buildings being blown up, bullets pinging around him -- and into a doorway and up a flight of stairs and through room after room until he finds what he's searching for -- the first woman to become pregnant in eighteen years.
Owen, and some supporters who come and go, are trying to get this pregnant African stranger to an offshore haven where, biology permitting, the human race will begin to reproduce itself again. I was unable to figure out how one baby will save the species.
Neither is the reason for the pandemic infertility ever explained but it doesn't really matter much. It's basically a chase movie. Owen and his charge don't have many friends. It's a Hobbesian war of all against all. London is a wreck. The ruins are filled with refugees from other countries, each eagerly killing one another, shouting slogans, waving their AK-47s over their heads. The air is filled with gun fire. A pox on all their houses; a midline granuloma!
As a chase movie it's pretty good, carrying a powerful emotional message. The gravid woman, who is quite ordinary, is a Life Force, kind of like Zorba the Greek. I guess that's intended to be good, and it is if you ignore certain inconvenient facts. (The tubercle bacillus has a Life Force too.) It's also easy to read a religious lesson in it. None of that's necessary though. It's tense and tautly constructed, even if it doesn't make much sense. The refugees have no one they can trust and few are anxious to help them. The best seem to lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
I am, though, getting tired of this photographic conceit in which the sun never shines, everyone is grimy and greasy, it's either drizzling or looks about to, every object has an unhappy greenish tinge, and all the men need a shave. Enough already. I also have to wag my finger because there are plenty of dogs in the movie but no cats. My cat, Ajax the Lesser, pointed this out to me. Outside of a dog, a cat is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to see.
There is also a kind of paradox built into the movie. The only hope for mankind is a return to fertility. Yet what we see of mankind doesn't reflect well upon it. With all social niceties being eliminated, there seems to be nothing left of government but a horde of uniformed murderous fascists. Judge Learned Hand said, "A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few." In this world, everyone appears intent on killing everyone else in order to be among the savage few.
The writers should have challenged some of their own assumptions. Look at what Homo sapiens has accomplished -- in 2027 and now. Do we really want to start it all over again? Is the Earth better off for our presence on it?