Wow. Just Wow.

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2007)

'Children of Men' can be described as a speculative fiction thriller set in the UK 20 years in the future.
I was really blown away by this movie. I wasn't quite expecting it and went into it knowing extremely little about it which is probably how it actually should be viewed. I picked up right away on the technical reasons for its specialness which I won't go into in order not to spoil anything about it. But I will say that it is perhaps the most uncompromising, haunting and compelling vision of the future I may have ever seen and that it is very rich with a lot of heavy details, many of which could have been the whole subject of a whole lesser movie in itself. I read the synopsis of the plot on Wikipedia to better understand it and I literally had to stop for a few minutes after reading each sentence and let what they were saying sink in, in light of what I had seen. It is quite often extremely intense almost to the point of making you want to look away from the screen, but they do not achieve this intensity really in any of the traditional Hollywood ways. I'd have to see it again, but I don't even think they used any music during those sequences. It has a very raw feel to it and yet is very sophisticated at the same time, but it is not totally relentless either. The makers of the movie were very clever in how they marketed it. It has been a very successful movie at least in the U.S. without really any commercial hype behind it, relying almost totally on word of mouth and it very much deserves that success. It makes V for Vendetta look like a Saturday morning cartoon. The violence in it is very very realistic and grim and disturbing, as in fact violence should be! It's not glorified or gratuitous in any way. This is not a movie to see if you don't like movies that give you a lot to think about. Quite frequently while watching it, I had to remind myself again and again that I was just watching a movie that somebody had produced. That says a lot to me because I tend to be pretty jaded and cynical when it comes to movies, I've seen so many of the moves they can make. But I got the impression that effect was a pretty typical reaction to it. No doubt one of the best movies, if not the best movie, to come out in 2006, it will give me a lot to remember and ponder about for a long time to come.