Well Done Dystopic

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2007)

There's nothing I like better than a good dystopic and this pic has its dystopia down pat. Set in a near future that has seen the death of the world's children and a pandemic of infertility the film moves deliberately forward to the inevitable great hope, about which I'll say no more, across a sad grayscape of loss and despair and survivor's guilt and survivor's humor.
I was so happy to see Michael Caine's jolly little performance here because, while he's always an asset (except in movies such as Bewitched which appear to render assets an impossibility), I was beginning to wonder if he still had any life, any vibrancy left in him after seeing him in some of his recent, more quiet roles.
I was also extremely impressed (and relieved -- because I always want very much to like the movie I'm watching, after all) by the fact that this film, while out of necessity relying on certain conventions of the action and science fiction genres manages, when some of its protagonists are "on the run" to avoid devolving into the usual chase/fight/wisecrack scenes as too many potentially good films do (The Island, for example, which peaked early and went south fast.), but instead shifts gears during the fugitve segment to resolve the pursuit by way of a (correctly) dreary sequence of urban combat on a near-documentary level of reality suffused with the sense of a clumsy, desperately stumbling struggle to live and maybe live better.
I'd like to tell you why I liked the ending, but I don't like spoilers when they can be avoided, but I will say that I like both types endings to pictures with dystopian settings. I like a hopeful dystopia if it's accomplished correctly, without hypersentimentality because such a work causes me to think: Yes, that's us, it's bad, but somehow we'll always make it because of the potential that's inside each and every one of us. And I like a hopeless dystopia, if it's accomplished correctly and without excessive heavy-handedness because such a work makes me think: Yep. That's us. We've screwed things up to the point where everything we do to try to make things better can only screw them up more and sooner or later we'll be the death of us.
Anyway, I liked this film because it made me think: That's us.