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Jan 14, 2008

It is 2027, human race is infertile, no child has been born on earth since almost two decades. Then the miracle happens in the unlikeliest of places and Clive Owen is put in charge to transport this miracle. Clive Owen seems like he has been typecast playing the transporter, the driver, the deliverer etc etc. The first time I saw him was as a driver in one of the BMW shorts. He was Madonna's driver in that short directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie.

Anyway coming back to Children of Men, the germ of the movie is based on the P.D.James's novel of the same name. But there are significant differences in the plot between the movie and the book. I had read the book about a year back and was expecting to see an exact moving, talking, emoting replica on screen, but director Alfonso Cuaron has veered it away to a much broader perspective than a power struggle between two individual(as it was in the book) which turns out to be better.

But there are certain points which gets cloudier as director steers away from the book. For example there is no clear explanation about the reason for their fleeing. The infertility element is transfered from the male to the female to give it a more socio-religious implication? Don't know. Although I read at some places about the film's parallels to the birth of Jesus although unlike in the book the first child born is a girl.

Best thing about the movie is the bonus materials section of its DVD, which is a good documentary in itself cataloging the changes and opinions of the current world. The movie attempts to address a lot of issues - immigrants, capitalism and the demise of world economy, repercussions of humans playing God with the use of technology etc, with one shot(or rather a series of scenes.) I am not sure how much they've succeeded. It is an interesting film for someone to watch in 2007-08. There are a lot of ways the world can go wrong. This gives a glimpse of the future from a place where there is no future to look forward to. It doesn't mean future would be grim, grimy and depressing with a light finally turned on at the end of the tunnel as in the movie, it is just one of the many possible futures, thanks to our(human) excesses.

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