Frighteningly bad

Rating: 1/10 (30 September 2007)

I have just watched this film and I am flabbergasted that it has made it into the top 250. Clearly a lot of money has been thrown at this (because it has a good hook) and the producers have got an exciting and upcoming director attached to it as well as 2/3 biggish names to act in it. 10/10 for marketing because I was quite sure this was going to be a decent film. How wrong could I be? The structure is awful. It's a horribly messy plot that makes little or no sense. There's a baby! So what? How is one baby going to save the world. Just one of 100 unanswered questions. The acting, meanwhile, is frighteningly bad. Even Clive Owen (who was excellent in Inside Man) is like a poor Nicholas Cage in this. The lesser known actors are laughably bad. This is the worst casting I've ever witnessed; the casting director appears to have just hired lots of women and black people to create a nauseatingly politically correct vision of the future. I spent the entire film feeling as though as I was in a big budget BBC drama. The expensive assembled scenes for the war scenes look soulless and frankly pathetic compared to, say, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. The editor has taken the colour out of the film to make it look bleak. How clever. Worst of all, from the first to last minute I didn't care about the protagonist. This film could, and perhaps should, have been great. How sad that it was given to Cuarón, and how disturbing that most people are impressed with this farcical 'futuristic' England. Did Cuarón even visit even the UK to research this travesty? I doubt it.