Not one of the best films

Rating: 5/10 (16 September 2007)

An explanation of why I don't think this is a great a film as some have said: Unremarkable film for people who don't have much imagination. Its well made and well acted but the script is not very good, either they explain too much or not enough and almost everything is geared to driving the plot. I felt like I was being force fed the story, which didn't seem to spin out organically.Characters exist purely to serve the plot with the sole exception of Michael Caine who is the only one with a real character. There is a sense of place, but also the sense that somewhere just off the screen there is something else , the film crew (in Bladerunner we got a sense of a bigger world- the space stations of the replicants exists- here I'd be hard pressed to wonder if anything other than England does). Indeed much of the film's world makes no sense, scene after scene I felt was staged in the backgrounds and not real. You have scenes where everything is chaos and others where there is some form of order, but it sees to be two separate films. Also in a world of declining population there seems to be way way too many cops.
The best "new world" film exist and don't have to explain things to you.In the best you learn stuff "accidentally" on the way.In say Reign of Fire the world's rules are given to you in ways that are natural, as part of conversations, glimpses at headlines. In the worst they either explain too much or so little that nothing makes sense. Here we get endless droning from the TV and on on the signs. But ts almost too much information that only rehashes what we already know. There are these statements from the terrorists when Julianne Moore kidnaps Clive Owen that are meaningless dramatically since Owen would know it already, but which are fed in to inform us. We shouldn't be told in essentially declarative statements about things. Look at Bladerunner, we're dropped in this world and we don't get an explanation of anything, the world is. Owens story is potentially a prequel to Dekers so its odd that the world here is not as complete.
And the plot goes on and on and on with out any real character development. There are few if any real characters, mostly its just odd people wandering in and out with no real sense of who these people are.It would be okay if there was something for them to do, but there isn't, they just move the plot along. What is it between Julianne Moore and Owen? Who are these other people? I don't know. there are huge streams of back story that are hinted at but never touched, which can be gotten away with if you have characters and not cut outs. It would also help if you had a writer who wasn't interested in just moving the plot, who could with a line say volumes, thats not the case. The words are constructed to move things along not build character and situations.
I know part of the problem is changes from the book (which I haven't read) Julianne Moore's character is actually two characters combined, and there are other changes that probably didn't help.
Again its not bad, its just not one of the best films of the year, technically maybe, and certainly Michael Caine should be up for an Oscar, but the story as told on screen doesn't amount to much.