A disastrous adaptation

Rating: 3/10 (2 December 2007)

*** This review contains HUGE SPOILERS for the movie AND THE BOOK ***
Although I don't usually write reviews with spoilers, this total botch of a film requires me to discuss several essential plot points in order to explain just how poorly the movie has been made.
Films need not slavishly follow the books on which they are based. Movies often need to remove minor subplots and to rearrange certain details for dramatic effect. With that said, however, Alfonso Cuaron's dreadful screenplay manages to take a pretty good book by P. D. James and turn it into a preachy, incoherent mess driven largely by fight scenes, chase scenes, and heavy-handed political statements.
Let's start with the climax of the film: for the first time in over eighteen years, a child is born. Excuse me, but aside from the novelty value, why should anyone in that sad world care? No one knows what's causing the sterility, so there's no reason to believe that the birth is anything but a fluke. Even if the child herself turns out to be fertile, there are now two fertile women in the entire world. Big deal.
This illogical point is nowhere to be found in the book. The novel makes it clear that only men have become sterile, so finding even one fertile man would indeed be a basis for hope that the world might regenerate. The father of the child is clearly fertile, and the battle for his sperm is charged with both dramatic and political interest. The child also turns out to be a boy, providing additional hope. Unfortunately, Cuaron ditched this logical and interesting story in favor of a soft-headed Christian/feminist allegory that doesn't work at all. Worse yet, he allows the movie to plod onwards through a mind-numbing half hour of tedious fight scenes after the climactic birth.
The book raises some thought-provoking issues about how such a society might function. Much of the book's thoughtful balance is achieved through the back-and-forth between Theo and his friend Xan. Xan? Who the hell is that? Xan is the nominal leader of England and one of the book's central characters. Replacing him with some minor bureaucrat who has about two minutes of screen time was a fatal error. The moral ambiguities of Xan's edicts -- should even minor criminals be carted off to some hell-hole prison to preserve order in a crisis? -- have been replaced by ham-handed and endlessly repeated scenes of illegal immigrants being mistreated and deported.
Cuaron could have taken this interesting story, tightened it up a bit (the book is too drawn-out), and ended up with a fine film of psychological and moral complexity. Unfortunately, he took the opposite route, grossly oversimplifying the ethical issues and focusing on the tiresome chases and fights that represent the book's weakest moments. A major disappointment.