I was robbed!

Rating: 5/10 (18 April 2007)

When I invest two hours of my life into a movie I'd like some kind of satisfying resolution. Even David Lynch with his abstract, dreamy stream of consciousness filmaking leaves the viewer satisfied on some level. That is not the case here.
"Children of Men" thrusts the viewer into a future where men and women are sterile and faced with certain death. Our hero, Clive Owen drags himself through this world, jaded and sluggish - averting the eyes and pleas of non-British citizens, foreigners and immigrants violently imprisoned behind barbed wire in public places. The "resistance" discovers the only pregnant woman in Britain and recruits Clive to transport her to safety - to the mysterious group known as the "human project". How any of this pandemic and social collapse came to be is never explained.
As the story unfolds we meet the "resistance" - kind of a Mad Max Population meets Hip Hop meets Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition meets Greenpeace Boat Sailors. The wise man who counsels Owen in his desperate, meaningless and doomed existence is his own dad! But this a special dad - it's Michael Caine dressed up to look exactly like John Lennon married to a woman in a Yoko Ono costume. In this flick, Mr. Lennon's seventy and tenderly caring for a mute staring Yoko, I mean Mrs. Caine who'd been tortured into an autistic existence by the British government for some unexplained reason (just like everything else that goes on here). Mr. Lennon aka Caine, is still the merry mop top prankster, smoking dope and daring Clive to pull his finger after which he lets rip a disgusting fart! Ha!Ha! The stirring background music to this loving family is a Rolling Stones soundtrack featuring an achingly sung version of Ruby Tuesday.
At this point I should have said "Hello Goodbye". But I continued to plow on, like my reluctant, but consciousness awakened hero Clive. Even after the liberal, brave hearted, resistance leader - the determined and beautiful Julianne Moore is gunned down by what we and Clive discover are her own followers. It gets even more ridiculous. Every time the pregnant black woman is revealed to the world, the stunned observer cries out "Jesus Christ"! There's a Monty Pyhonesque fellow who rescues and later shoots our hero! Lots and lots of random shooting by who knows who! Trying to glean some explanation I even watched this DVD's making of featurettes. I knew I was on the road to enlightenment, when they interviewed several talking heads who made bold comments about global warming as water rushed between icebergs. Maybe I need Barak Obama and Al Gore to explain this flick to me!