Mostly a routine action film set in a childless future

Rating: 7/10 (16 May 2007)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
Science fiction is always about the present. This has been true since the beginning of science fiction. It has to be true since we can only extrapolate from the present to the future. Only rarely, once in a million tries perhaps, does somebody come up with something truly original, or something unpredictable. Leonard Da Vinci foresaw submarines, but if you think about it, he had the example of turtles, whales and dolphins. Who foresaw nuclear energy? Who foresaw electricity and all that it can do? So this is about the present. The refugee camp could be in Palestine. The round up of immigrants is what many people in Europe and the US want. It may happen tomorrow; in fact it is happening to some extent. The irony and perhaps the illogic of this film is that with no babies being born, now for eighteen years, there is no labor force coming on to do the grunt work of society. So why are the Brits in a frenzy of anti-immigration? Apparently because of a fascist government has come to power.
This reminds me a bit of something from Terry Gilliam who directed 12 Monkeys (1995) and Brazil (1985). There is something about the decadent and bombed out feel of the scenes that is the same.
This is a film for the underdog, for the oppressed. It is in a symbolic sense a statement about aging Europe with its declining birth rates needing the fertility of people from southern climes, people of color to save the world from extinction. In Europe today there are countries with birth rates so low that their populations are declining. In both Europe and the US it is immigrants who are supporting the declining populations which are increasingly old. In the US we have winked at the influx of illegal immigrants for decades because those in power know two things: (1) cheap labor is good for their bottom line; and (2) without young people paying into social security, the system will go bankrupt.
The sets were exquisite, the battle scenes in the refugee camp seemed as authentic as the nightly news, well focused and involving. The camera work was outstanding and carefully set up. Michael Caine as the aging hippy was perfect. I saw him recently in The Prestige (2006) and I have to say, he is like a man with a new career in his mid-seventies. Claire-Hope Ashitey, who played Kee with her big eyes and her fresh face and her reserved style was also very good. Clive Owen looked as heroic as the part demanded, and Julianne Moore in a limited role was good.
There was some corniness in the movie and some politically correct stuff, like Kee braiding the old woman's hair and our hero being sensitive enough to be a midwife (today's men are above and beyond the purely macho). There is also a root for the underdog feel throughout with the good guys (relatively speaking) being outsiders. The scene where the government troops stand in awe of a baby's cry was striking (imagine how Spielberg would have milked this!), but I suspect that somebody, at hearing of the first human birth in over eighteen years, would have ignored the resumption of fire and stayed with the only woman on earth who was fertile. I think everyone would have wanted to protect her and her baby.
A nice touch that director Alfonso Cuaron could have brought to the film was to show us people doing extreme things in their desperation to have children, worshipping icons of fertility maybe, acting out weird rituals while imbibing strange concoctions. Instead of just showing some religious demonstrators blaming the lack of human fertility on sinfulness, we might have gotten a glimpse of fertility cults drinking the essence of goat eggs or rhino horns as they danced around some fertility symbol. Maybe there could have been a national health crisis as myriads of people, especially women, went crazy or committed suicide because of depression brought on by infertility. Actually there was a hint of this in the movie but it was greatly underdeveloped.
Another problem with this film (from my POV; for others this might be a plus) is that the direction relies heavily on action sequences. There are chase scenes (and a nice car door opening gimmick used twice, once to knock the bad guys off their motorcycles, and once to knock down one of the fishes holding a gun). But there was little subtlety in the story. Most of the subtlety in the movie is in the scenes themselves and in the camera work. And the characters are rather one-dimensional. Theo (Clive Owen) is merely heroic. He fights through the bullets and the other obstacles to help Kee and her baby. Kee herself is hardly developed at all. Michael Caine's character Jasper is the only one with any real depth.
Two final points: I don't think this film is nearly as interesting as Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien (2001), and I would not dream of watching this film without subtitles since a lot of the dialogue is almost inaudible to these ancient ears.
By the way, a discussion of why women were infertile and how the movie differs from the book can be found at the IMDb.