Grey, grim, gritty and depressing, as it should be

Rating: 7/10 (16 January 2007)

I won't tell the story of the film as others do over and over, but I will offer a commentary.
In this gritty and harsh end-of-the-world-coming film there were too many unexplained reasons for everything bad that had happened/was happening to the world for me to say this was a great movie, but it did have its very effective moments if you could look past its story holes, inconsistencies and oversights. It is true that harsh, apocalyptic films like this one are tough to watch, but are absolutely necessary for all of us to see many times from this point on, as people worldwide do not respond to subtle messages about our environment, pollution, war, and global warming so they must be hit in the face by a story like this one regularly to show what can/could happen to us if we don't wake up and stop the world-killing atrocities that we are committing against other humans and to the earth. The film story left out the causes of the horrible state of the earth and concentrated on the effects of these atrocities, which were truly horrible to witness. All of it was very shocking, as something like it really could and may happen.
The story of getting a mother and child, the only one in the world, out of England to someplace secret to perhaps provide a chance for humans to start anew, was your typical chase story with all the typical suspense, pitfalls, threats, violence and mayhem along the way. Nothing too unusual or different there. The ending was the hope the filmmaker gave us. But, what would that baby girl do later to save our species even if she escaped? Any possibility for the future hinged on finding a fertile male somewhere, but no babies had been born for many years so what were the chances of that? Would they try to use frozen sperm from an earlier and fertile time? No questions like this one were ever posed or answered.
The impact of the obvious "baby Jesus" scene near the end was very forceful, as it represented the filmmaker's idea of perhaps the only chance at a new beginning for our human-screwed-up-world in 2027, just as Jesus' birth was hoped to be 2000 years earlier. That powerful scene showed the immense reverence and amazement of even the military, which briefly ceased its vicious attack on insurgents as the mother and baby passed by. It was like a 2x4 slamming into your head as it made its point of, "this baby is perhaps the only chance for human survival!".
I had a problem with story inaccuracies, as in its technical representations everything.....the tanks, guns, cars, clothing and even TV's showed no improvements over those around today and in many cases they were worse. No progress there, so the problems shown were obviously around for many years, perhaps since 2007? No clue, no answers. Also, if the country was in such chaos, why were the roads everywhere passable without roadblocks? Where did they get fuel? And, how did everyone eat, sleep, work, make money to live on, etc.? No good explanations were given for any of that. The film just wanted us to accept what it showed and concentrate on the devastation and human depravity. But I needed a more full and complete story of the social mess and its causes, and this wasn't one so I was left with too many unanswered questions that should have been answered.
This movie has been out a week and hardly anyone was in the theater, so it probably won't make a profit.... depressing and/or apocalyptic films, even though foretelling an impossible or even somewhat hopeful future for us, usually don't make money. We just don't want to face what we have done and what may result from it so we stay away.