I saw Children of Men tonight; it was, in my humble opinion, the best film of 2006. (Humble, and at least somewhat uninformed -- recall that I have yet to see either of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films ... nor have I yet seen Happy Feet.)
I'll let J. Hoberman of the Village Voice set the stage. (The entirety of Hoberman's review is here.) Hoberman begins recounting the plot of the movie by praising
the intelligent path Children of Men takes through James's 1992 novel, preserving while enriching her allegorical premise. Humanity is facing its own extinction—not through nuclear proliferation or global warming, but the end of fertility. Like James's book, the movie opens with the violent death of the world's youngest person (18-year-old "Baby Diego," stabbed by an irate fan in Buenos Aires) and imagines what might happen if the human race were granted a miraculous second chance. ...The year is 2027 but the mood is late 1940. "The world has collapsed," a BBC newsreader explains. "Only Britain soldiers on"—barely. The U.K. is a mecca for illegal immigrants, as well as a bastion of neo-fascist homeland security. London's smog-shrouded smear of garbage, graffiti, and motorcycle rickshaws is the shabbiest of havens. Armed cops are ubiquitous, and refugees—or 'fugees—are locked up in curbside cages. Religious cultists parade through the streets. Terrorists and looters control the despoiled landscape poignantly dotted with long-abandoned schools.
Enormously sympathetic, as always, Owen plays a wry and rumpled joker—less an actual character than a nexus of connections. His ex-wife (Julianne Moore) is an underground revolutionary; his buddy (Michael Caine) is a scene-stealing old hippie with a secret house in the woods. He has a well-off cousin in the government (Danny Huston) who lives in what looks like a South Bank power station amid recovered artworks, including Michelangelo's David (missing a leg) and Picasso's Guernica, and no longer worries about tomorrow. Owen's warmth is such that everyone trusts him, including animals and a mysterious young woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) who needs to be smuggled through the countryside.
The feel of the movie is flawlessly rendered ... even down to the tattered "London 2012" sweatshirt, a memento of the Olympic games, that Clive Owen's character wears as he careens from the Baghdad of London, 2027, which -- like its counterpart in the fertile crescent -- also seems to be divided into Red and Green Zones, to a Gitmo-like refugee detention camp, and finally to an urban battleground that recalls any of the hot zones in Al Anbar province over the past 3 years.
I'll post more on the film in a day or two, but I just wanted to waste no time in encouraging everyone to see it. If you don't take my word for it, here are Manohla Dargis, Anthony Lane, and David Ansen to add their two cents.
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