Powerful images, questionable screenplay

Rating: 7/10 (30 January 2011)

This movie actually reminds me a fair amount of Apocalypse Now. Obviously the premise is inverted; in this movie the protagonists are hunted rather than hunting (although they are hunting a boat, I suppose). But in both cases there is a ceaseless progression from one increasingly surreal episode to the next. The lack of exposition feeds the sense of uncertainty (and apparently leads to some great frustration in some of the other reviews). Where the movie succeeds is not in an overriding message or in the story as a whole, but in individually powerful scenes such as the birth of the child, the entrance into the refugee camp where people are being executed, the shooting of Julian. Where things break down completely into chaos I was also reminded of Full Metal Jacket.
The story as a whole has its weak points, and this is even if you accept the premise that hunting down a boat to give them a baby may somehow save humanity. I find it hard to believe that a large number of soldiers, seeing their first baby in 18 years, would allow themselves to be distracted by anything long enough to let it get away. I also found that the Fishes had an almost magical ability to track down the protagonists wherever they went. Jasper can hide his pot dealing apparatus from the authorities for years, but the Fishes sniff them out almost instantly. They disappear into a secure refugee camp where nobody knows who they are, but when chaos starts the Fishes show up. And for all the size of the Fish movement, it's the same three or four folks who keep bumping into Theo. I feel the story would have been more effective if the Fishes had simply not been seen again after Jasper's place (if they really even needed to be seen there). Fascist British troops and the denizens of the camp itself could surely have provided sufficient villainy for the dramatic tension towards the end, and it would have felt a bit less contrived that way.
Ultimately I ended up liking the idea of the movie better than the execution, due to these writing issues. Keeping things mysterious is a nice alternative to the exposition-laden alternative, but in this case doing so fails to obfuscate the internal inconsistencies that tend to drive some of us nuts.