What is all the fuss about?

Rating: 2/10 (16 May 2007)

I had waited a long while to catch this movie on DVD hoping that the hype surrounding it would die down enough for me to enjoy it. However I was constantly bombarded with comments from friends and even the video store clerk, that this movie was 'greaaaatt'. OK I said I'll see for myself.
Firstly the acting is absolutely awful and isn't really helped by a poor script with shoddy, cringe-worthy dialogue 'ohhhhh I forgot how beautiful babies were'...oh please. Clive Owen looks lost, he's got his next movie on his mind, either that or he's thinking about a holiday on the Med. I never related to one single character in the movie and couldn't care less whether they lived or died. That said there were numerous pointless deaths.
The dystopian future that is created is so hackneyed it's laughable. Kids throwing rocks at the train, that stuff already happens where I'm from, it's not particularly frightening. Graffiti, jackbooted thugs, small fires, people speaking in foreign tongues, sorry have I not seen all this before somewhere.
The plot or lack of it is probably the most fundamental problem. We drift from one scene to another with not much happening, we are given no credible back-story to get us interested. When Cuaron realizes he has a kipper on his hands he ups the pace a bit in the final few scenes, but unfortunately he goes too far and it ends up almost like a video game.
Finally numerous colleague's commented on how well it looks, mainly in reference to the cinematography. Sorry people, have ye been locked away in a closet for the last ten years. Lubezki is just trotting out the 'style de jour', there is nothing original in any of the cinematography. I have seen this style handled better by the likes of Kaminski in Private Ryan and Idziak in Black Hawk Down. In both these movies the DPs had to tackle the style on a grand scale, there is nothing like this in Children of Men. The scenes in the farmhouse are particularly weak and look out of place with the rest of the film. Too much reliance on practical sources made this overall quite a flat film, a muddy grey sludge of a palette, where there is no depth separation.