children of men

This last weekend's DVD was Children of Men, starring Clive Owen.

It's apparently adapted from a book by P.D.James, who I normally associate with crime novels, though apparently it's only loosely adapted. Either way, the film is bloody good.

The idea of it is basically that the world is going to hell, only rather than zombie apocalypses or viruses, the reason is rather subtle - all women on the planet have become infertile, and have been for a good 18 years or so. It also rather cleverly never tries to explain why.

Of course themes are touched on - is it a punishment from God or some virus, or what? But it never really focuses on the why. Instead it focuses on hope - Clive Owen's character (and I dunno if this counts as spoiler or not, so you may want to skip ahead) ends up having to escort a young, pregnant, Black African woman out of Britain. She's trying to get to what we assume is some sort of scientific research institute called the Human Project.

But there's so much more going on than that. The film is set in England and the impression we're given is that it's the only place in the world still vaguely working properly, but it's not exactly a picnic. There's global terrorism and Britain is flooded with illegal refugees, for example. Our government has also devolved into fascism and all refugees and immigrants are forcibly evicted and/or put into concentration camps. But there are revolutionaries and freedom fighters in the mix too.

As you can tell, there's a whole heap of stuff. But the clever thing about the film is that it never gets lost in those things. It's about hope - the hope of the first pregnant woman in twenty years.

The other clever thing is how it's shot. Rather amazingly, most of it is done in some very, very long single-takes. I mean literally 5+ minute long single takes that never cut. Technically, this is a very difficult thing to do once, but it's used repeatedly throughout the film.

It has an incredibly powerful effect, especially when it's a dramatic or action-oriented scene. In an odd way, it actually manages to capture some of the visceral excitement of playing a first-person shooter game, only Clive Owen basically never uses a gun.

I'd highly recommend the film. In fact, I'm currently contemplating buying the special edition DVD (the standard version has almost no extras - just one short featurette) and then even doing a proper review.