A thinking person's thriller? Thinking about what?

Rating: 6/10 (24 February 2007)

The cinematography is stunning. That's about it. Somebody called their review "A thinking person's thriller" - thinking about what? I don't have a problem with a "what if" factor, it's an integral part of fiction: what if (due to pollution, hormones and/or preservatives in food, or whatever) we did stop breeding? It's a fine premise for a dystopia. What stumped me is the confusion around the political points the writers were trying to make about illegal immigration and didn't quite succeed. If the UK is the only country left standing, *should* it let everybody in and make room for them? Why? Then again, considering the march of young Muslim men waving rifles in the refugee camp and chanting "Allah Akbar," maybe they *shouldn't* let everyone just run loose? Maybe not. Maybe the walls around the refugee camp aren't thick enough. But maybe they also shouldn't beat the refugees and push them around and yell at them. They probably shouldn't. But being the only country left standing, a country the size of a handkerchief, the one everybody wants to get in, maybe they're a little stressed out? Unfortunately, the filmmakers spent a ton of screen time on creating this pseudo-political confusion, at the expense of creating their main character. Who is this dude Theo and why does he do the things he does? He just wanders around in a daze without any apparent motivation other than the memory of his dead son, which is an unbearably lame cliché and explains nothing. Until the end, we never get to know him as a real person. It helps that Clive Owen is so easy on the eye, but if the main character never comes alive as a person, the story isn't worth following, and what happens to him doesn't matter all that much. The other characters are just as one-dimensional and archetypical, and that hampers the acting, even from such favorites as Michael Caine, even though he knocks himself out to give his character an extra dimension, which brings it to a whopping two. And that's a shame, because it could have been a good story if the writers (I mean the screenwriters; I haven't read the original James novel) focused more on the human beings at the center of it than on the difficult and complex politics of illegal immigration, about which they don't seem to know much.
Nevertheless, it's worth repeating: the cinematography, the whole look, is excellent.