Good science fiction provides a vision of the future that gives us a window into the present.  Unfortunately, for each Orwell there’s a dozen others who create a vivid future, but populate it with shallow characters, an empty plot, and either lack social commentary, or even worse, don’t even bother to make it subtle.  In an era when the V for Vendetta movie is lauded for not butchering the brilliant comic too badly.  Children of Men (read better reviews than mine here), which I saw earlier tonight, executed perfectly the way SciFi should, rather than how it usually does.

I was going to write a longer post, but it’s getting late, so here’s the gist of it:

• The sets are so detailed that during nearly every seen, you dart around trying to pick up on minor things by reading signs, newspapers, pictures, and anything you can.  For a lot of scenes, I wished I could pause the theater.  In the same vein, the future technology is in the realm of possibility.  The movie feels like it’s one step in the future, not a giant leap, so that you feel like their world is ours, just with slight differences.
• It had one of the best portrayals of violence I’ve seen in a movie.  Not because it was necessarily real (I wouldn’t know to judge), but because it didn’t feel cartoonish or excessive, and it was placed perfectly.  The violence made you hate violence - this was a fight you didn’t want to be a part of.   At the end (I’m trying to avoid spoilers), the combat made you hate war - and wish there wasn’t a similar one going on.
• Because it was tangential to the plot, and the world felt slightly different enough that you knew it wasn’t our own, Children of Men could criticize things like military occupation, attitudes towards immigration, political activism, police state, art, class differences, and so much more.  It made you think about them, it didn’t preach about them, and it was so subtle that you could enjoy the movie without noticing any of it.

There are other things that I know I’m missing, but I can’t stress enough how awesome this movie was.  So far, it’s the best movie I’ve seen in 2007, and probably better than any movie I saw in 2006.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Movies, Winter of Dave