Well, that was a laugh.

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2006)

I'm not rating this as I can't really be honest. It's like "Brazil" except not funny, it's "Threads" for the post-Cold War generation.
It's horrible. It's like "War of the Worlds" done by a Brit. We are spared nothing. It's one long, slow slide into despair and chaos.
The most affecting scene for me were the torture chambers at the refugee camps with people having their clothes stripped off in lines at gun point. The camera makes a long, slow point in this sequence, hovering first over men kneeling with the arms clasped behind their heads, then people tied up in cages, then rows of people being marched around in circles, then rows of naked bodies. None of it's done with slick sci-fi technology, it's just the same old techniques on display across the news everywhere these days.
Nothing works properly in this society. Even the getaway car won't start. The terrorists motives are entirely understandable but they are so totally wrong-headed in everything they do that they're doomed from the outset.
SPOILER The minute Jasper walked on-screen I knew he was completely doomed. "GET OUT OF THE MOVIE!" I wanted to yell at him. "YOU'RE A HIPPY IN A FASCIST POLICE STATE!" There is doom and failure and death and weeping by the bucketload in this movie. From the soul-deadening opening sequence through the art collector's warped and twisted little empire to the Rape of Bexhill, there is not one moment of lightness or hope.
DOOM. BLEAKNESS. HOPELESSNESS. DESPAIR...
Ahem.
It's all a bit... *self-absorbed*...
So, I'm not really sure how to rate it, because although it's a very horrible and convincing projection of *present day* society's fears onto the future (which is what much of science fiction often is rather than a prediction of the future), I don't think it's *convincing* because there's any real likelihood that that's what the REAL future's going to be like. I think it's convincing because it's currently extraordinarily fashionable to wallow and the wallowers are easily convinced of a sort of indefinable inevitability. Especially if you're fiscally comfortable.
Personally, I disapprove of this wallowing, and the entire film's awash with it. So, although as an exercise in stylish, grey-minded, desaturation-filtered wallowing it deserves the full "10", as a *film*... I can't say it's all that good.
This film has many serious axes to grind, and worthy axes they are too and long due a sharpening...but I have a nasty feeling the film-maker doesn't know which end of an axe is supposed to be the sharp one...