Ultimately Disappointing

Rating: 7/10 (16 January 2007)

What a premise! What painstaking execution and set design! What a bunch of script problems! This is the kind of film that demands a satisfying 3rd act and ending. It eventually comes up just a little short. At the beginning of the film, it is clear above all else, youth is the ultimate commodity. A newborn baby, it would be assumed, would be the miracle of miracles for all of humanity.
Why, then, must so many characters be so wrongheaded about how to handle this? You have the government, who (never explicitly but are assumed) would discredit the mother and seize the infant as its own scientific property (and in this desperate hour, the Big problem is?) You have the radicals fighting for situational (and ultimately fleeting) freedoms of dignity. And then the vulgarians who always populate a post-apocalyptic story. You know, the ones who are so bent on survival at the lowest order that they are constantly laughing and easily fooled when the promise of money or food is dangled before them.
Unfortunately, Children of Men populates itself with too many characters from other post-apocalyptic stories and only successfully covers this up when the camera accomplishes what must have been the impossible. I give much respect and admiration to the crew capable of executing some exceedingly complicated and exciting long-takes. However, a 3rd act shootout provides a glaring reminder of the presence of the camera and its documentary-like hand-held omnipresence that it more disrupts than enhances the film's statement.
In final appraisal, this film had so very much going for it but ultimately comes up short where it should have been fixed months (if not years) ago. The script has an unsatisfying and ultimately tedious and anti-climactic ending. Pity. It was really something to behold until then.