"The Pianist" set in the future

Rating: 7/10 (30 July 2009)

My score: 7 out of 10 I expected this to be yet another set-slightly-in-the-future, run-from-the-fascist-government, your-friends-drop-off-one-by-one survival movie, urban-warfare movie. I suppose I cannot honestly think of another movie that combines ALL those elements. "Minority Report" - a brilliant original concept - has all but the friends-dropping aspect. "Logan's Run" omits most of the urban-warfare. Frankly, I felt "The Pianist", which, of course, is set in the 1939 Warsaw ghetto, comes the closest to matching the feeling of being on the run from a omnipresent fascist government and surviving under barren war-torn conditions as in "Children of Men".
The incredibly-long-single-continuous shots in the urban warfare scene deserve a rewind: I lost my attention span somewhere halfway and don't remember where each edit cut begins.
I couldn't help but think of Clive Owen in "Shoot 'em Up" and every other high-octane film where he is constantly being shot at and laugh a little bit.
The acting is great. I believe they got the technology "right" for the year 2027 - very little improvement: a few animated advertisements on the sides of buses (and weed is still illegal!).
Here are the three big negatives: no where is it revealed specifically WHAT the UK government and what the Fishes want with the newborn baby. I really wanted to know that throughout the entire movie. Was one side desiring to repopulated the earth, or just one portion of it, and the other side opposing, or vice versa? What did the two major issues of infertility and an immigration problem out of control in the UK have to do with each other? For this kind of movie, I felt they really needed to be related, because, otherwise, my mind could not help think throughout the movie that a long period of worldwide infertility implies a general DECLINE in human population and, hence, a REDUCTION in immigration problems? I was SUPREMELY disappointed in the sudden ending, expecting the story to go fully into whatever the Human Project was about, even if it was to repopulate the earth. I still needed to know the details. Perhaps, that was NOT its purpose: who knows? Perhaps another twist lay in wait.