awesome awesome awesome awesome

Rating: 9/10 (13 July 2008)

An amazing bit of social commentary, Children of Men has the 1984 approach to science fiction in which the goal is not to portray the future but to comment on the present. England in chaos: fear of immigration has been built into a frenzy of blood lust and the poor live in violent squalor while the rich hide in pleasant enclaves. The movie references the Iraq war directly and uses strong visual imagery reminiscent of Abu Ghraib and the Holocaust.
At the same time, Children is an tense, exciting action movie, and it is remarkable how it manages to sacrifice neither its message or its entertainment value.
This is a very cinematic movie. There is almost no exposition, and those who want explanations will be disappointed; the movie asks the viewer to figure out a lot themselves.
The weakest aspect of the film is that the reason for the road trip/chase at the heart of the movie isn't convincingly set up. Everyone in the film is making assumptions about what will happen when it is revealed that after two decades of mysterious infertility, a woman is pregnant, but none of them seem to have really thought anything through, and the ultimate goal of the trip is decidedly fuzzy; exactly what are the expecting to happen? Fortunately, that only lightly mars the movie; it's a basic MacGuffin that is dropped in as an excuse for the action but not hammered upon enough to crack it.
The movie is also visually compelling. In wikipedia I read that there are several single-shot sequences in the movie, but I wasn't aware of them at the time, because I was too caught up in what was happening to be aware of the film's technical aspects. The single-shot approach is used not to show off but to heighten the intensity, and it works wonderfully.
A must see movie.