This movie is for you if you like watching people sit around for 2 hours.

Rating: 1/10 (19 September 2008)

Tell me if you've seen this scenario before: a movie that claims to be anti-Hollywood, and supposedly has a "deep moral and social commentary" that the critics love, only the movie turns out to be pretentious and one of the most pathetic movies ever made. That's about all there is to say about Children of Menit claimed to come and deliver all of us thriller fans to the promise land, but in reality it was even more pathetic than the multimillion making blockbuster.
First, there is NOTHING intellectual or deep as promised. I can hear the director/writer now: "I want to make another tired end-of-the-world movie, just like the ones I grew up watching on Saturday morning cartoons and then saw done in live-action more so many times it almost seemed cliché . . . but, umm, I can be original. Hey! Instead of a virus wiping out humanity, let's make women unfertile, but Everything else will be just like every other end-of-the-world movie ever made." Sadly, I guess people didn't pay attention in junior high English classes: by taking the most unoriginal story ever toldthe end of the worldand then changing one factor does not make it original. It's the same as replacing humans in the end of the world with animals and calling it original. Even then, infertility isn't an untouched subject by any means.

Original? Thought provoking? Neither.

Second, nothing happens in this movie. From opening to close, you see the same thing over and over again. They go from one angry mob to another angry mob; from one house to another house. Even then, the pacing is so ridiculously slow I was ready to fast forward because all that was happening was Napoleon Dynamite-like staring. Or pointless conversations. Or just downright NOTHING, where the camera will literally sit and stare at a wall. Children of Men took boredom to a whole new level I didn't even know existed.

Thrilling? If shots of the wall and lame conversations thrill you, you'll have gone in your pants 15 minutes in.

As far as technical details go: there was not even half of enough violence to earn this movie an R-rating. The cinematography is hand-held and it adds a layer of realism. This realism, however, just makes the movie even more dull and boring because it's exactly like what you could walk outside your house and see. It gives you even less of an excuse to pay attention. What Hollywood and indie filmmakers both don't understand is that what America wants isn't just another so-real-it's-scary thriller, we want something we can't walk outside our own houses and see. A mature fantasy, if you will. Why do you think 300 did so well, while this movie failed? Because 300 was a mature fantasy, while this is just another tired "thriller" that doesn't even have enough wind to thrill or enough intelligence to be original.
I just can't get over the fact that nothing happened in the entire runtime of this movie. That's why I gave it such a low score. The screenplay couldn't have been longer than 20 pages, because the scenes were long but there was nothing happening in them. Sure, it had a cute and different way to end humanity, but the story is so thin the average person could have thought of every detail of this movie in a coma.
I think it's movies like this that make me think originality is dead, not your big-name blockbusters. Blockbusters have expectations they have to match, but it's a sad day when indie films like this can't even think of something more original than this. What's even sadder is people like you try to build it up as intellectual and amazing instead of lowering your standards so something truly original and mind-blowing can have a chance to be released. The public opinion sells, and I guess this is what everyone wants: a hideously unoriginal film that claims to be intellectual but in reality is nothing more than a paper-thin plot with paper-thin characters and less thrills than a stroll down your street.
It's your call.
0/10