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I saw this one for the second time last weekend. I can't even recall the last time I saw a movie in the theater more than once. This movie is so visually rich though. I saw it again just to dig all the subtleties and visual cues I didn't pick up on the first time.

I would definitely watch it again, although my friends and I thought that it had enough emotional punch that it's the kind of movie you're not really going to want to watch twice in short succession. I completely agree about the set design, and the quality of the job the makers did of creating an entire world. There was just a lot of "texture" everywhere - litter, signs, graffiti, dings and scratches, tchotchkes, etc. Ellie, your comment about the office reminded me of something I thought, which was that the opening is a lot like Brazil - newscast is interrupted by terrorist bombing; warren of desks with glowing screens, glum office worker walks into cavelike office with short boss. One review I saw pointed out that there was a dog or cat, usually a dog, in almost every scene, even though they don't really enter into the plot. I'm still trying to figure out if there's some relevance to that.

I haven't seen the movie, but in the book domestic animals have taken the place of children. For whatever reason,this is especially true of cats. A litter of kittens is anticipated in the same way that the birth of a child would be. At the same time, there is some legal limit to when animals may be bred, but I don't recall any details. I imagine that the number of dogs and cats in the movie refers to that fetishizing of animals. Also, as there are fewer people to keep animals, there will be more feral dogs and cats around.l

Vaguely similarly, I've not yet rewatched my copy of Blair Witch Project just because it scared the Hell out of me.

I'd just like to reiterate that I found this movie, um, so so. I'd have rather seen Blackhawk Down again.

I hated the message of the book, not that the movie had anything to do with the book. ...but at least the book had something to say.

...Yeah, that's a thumbs down.

Well, like I said, the film had almost nothing to do with the book.

They took one aspect of the circumstances (not the premise, mind you) of the book. Borrow some of the character names (not the characters, mind you) and imagine a world where everyone is infertile...

I disagreed with the premises and points of the book, but it was put together beautifully. I can't emphasize this enough, but the film has almost nothing to do with the book!

It might be comparable to Naked Lunch the film ("Surely you realized that eventually we'd be contacting you?") as compared to "Naked Lunch" the book and Burroughs' other work. ...they're related, but the film doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the books.

I thought I said this somewhere in this thread? ...maybe it was another thread...

Imagine that they made films of the "Lord of the Rings" but they tweaked a few things. Namely:

1) There are no rings.
2) Gandalf is a bad guy
3) There is no Mount Doom
4) Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Merry and Pippen don't exist.
5) Sam Gamgee is a woman, and, moreover, Frodo's love interest
6) There are no elves, dwarves or orcs

At some point it stops being "Lord of the Rings", and that's more or less what they did with "The Children of Men". It isn't about the book.

And Jennifer's totally right about the plot falling off a cliff... What's more, it never gets started. They ignore the book almost entirely!

The main points of the book aren't even discussed... They turn it into an anti-American foreign policy, pro-civil rights piece, which is great...

But it's not about the book. And it's a shame. ...even though, I would argue, the book's message is about as un-libertarian and pro-nanny state a message as I can imagine...

For instance, one of the major themes of the book is that if you knew everything the government knew, you'd do the same things they do.

...this written by someone who spent her professional life as a bureaucrat!

Although it strikes me as being something like what you were talking about writing, Jennifer. You can read the paperback in a few hours, I'm sure. Think "Brave New World". It's kind of like that.

yeah i think you got it.

it's basically half-biopic/half amalgamation of his fiction. it's sort of like cronenberg producing what he imagines burrough's life at that time to have been like.

it is the best adaptation of an unfilmable author ever made.

Children of Men struck me as an excessively long chase scene mercifully punctuated by a weedhead Michael Caine.

Oh, from what I recall, I think the film downplayed it from the book...

...ever since seeing "Long War Round", by the way, I picture Sam Gamgee as looking like Charley Boorman.

Actually, I agree with this idea. If I knew everything the government knew*, I'd probably do the same things too**.

*i.e. almost nothing with any factual content, huge amounts of FUD, totally unjustified sense of own competence, etc.

** i.e. terrible ideas that work out badly, oppression for people's "own good", counterproductive economic interventions, etc.

Plot and theme weren't the focus of Children of Men Teh Movie. It was mostly a directoral technique set piece. Viewed that way, I thought it was very successful.

Viewed as a story with characters we care about and a point ... not so much.

Oh, certainly. I just don't see why the government would take the kid away and hand her over to someone else. Among other things, the mother is currently the only woman on earth capable of breast-feeding a baby.

Sigh. Typical government attitude.

I don't even think I have a decoder ring anymore, so I'm not too afraid of losing it, but I have to say, if I were the government, and there was exactly one woman on Earth who apparently could produce children, you'd better believe she'd be coming with me. Not because I didn't trust her to raise her kid, but because she represents the last hope for continuation of the species. Not to sound all "the Constitution is not a suicide pact-esque" (even though I *know* I do) but one person doesn't (shouldn't?) have the right to force the whole of humanity to go quietly into the night.

If I recall correctly, it was the men of the world who suddenly went infertile. They were all suddenly shooting blanks. Which would mean that much of my interest in this particular woman would start and end with who it was exactly who was able to impregnate her. I'd still want to examine her closely for at least a little while, though, but I don't think she was exactly special in terms of her abilities, just in the fact that she managed to find the one guy who could get women pregnant.

Even if the women also went infertile, though, I still don't think I'd just give up because my actions could only demonstrably move the end result further down the road. Women have hundreds of ova; what about surrogate mothers? What about creating artificial wombs? Or genetic experimentation? There are possible solutions, they just take work. And even if I wind up not being able to fix the problem, isn't it better to be working until I die to do so, rather than just calmly waiting for the end of humanity?

I don't think I can agree with that.

I think it would be wrong for the woman to, for example, kill any other existing human being, except in self-defense. That includes any already-existing children she may have. (And we can argue about when "children" start to "exist," and what constitutes self-defense, but let's not do that right now.)

However -- absent some kind of pre-existing agreemet -- I don't see how she would acquire any obligation to produce children to replace the other members of the human race when they die. She doesn't have that positive obligation to other members of the human race. The human race dying out is not her responsibility unless she herself is directly responsible for their individual infertility. Just as there is probably a baby in Africa that is going to starve to death today, but his death is not my responsiblity because I failed to ship him a meal.

Responsiblity of a parent to a child is a special case, and ill-defined in libertarian terms, but certainly the woman has no responsibility to children who have not yet begun to exist.

The rest of the human population, as individuals, are going to die no matter what. She can't do anything about that. They may want other people to be born to replace them, but they have no basis for making this woman produce those replacement people.

Acting together, they can probably induce a powerful bribe/payment to get her to agree to do so. Alternatively, if she refuses, they can withdraw from associating with her, refuse to provide her with food or anything, and refuse to trade with her, or interact with her in any way, and let her fend for herself as best she can -- as long as they don't actively interfere with her person or her property. They have that right to not associate with her.

Given that, I suspect they'll get their way in the end. Forcing her is probably not necessary. But I'm pretty sure it can't be justified.

The last fertile woman on earth, with the first baby born in decades, is going to need lots of protection from lots of people who will have lots of reasons for wanting to get involved with her. Unless she goes to an isolated valley or island and starts a new tribe (with people whom she trusts absolutely) while the rest of the world dies off, she'll eventually need protection, and that will mean joining with some group that can protect her.

In a world that's disintegrating, every local warlord who controls some territory is effectively running a state. Yes, Stevo, I know, ideally a world with disintegrating states would see the emergence of benevolent groups that provide security to consenting members, in a manner that doesn't involve local geographical monopolies. However, the stability of that arrangement requires that enough people buy into the basic ideas of peaceful cooperation. I'm not sure that a crumbling world will bring out the best in people.

Given that, she'll have to choose between tribes run by warlords or the crumbling remains of modern administrative states. (Or an isolated island, if she can get there in secret.) There are advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. The remains of a modern administrative state would probably provide more material comfort, and certain courtesies, but as the only fertile woman she'd be a lab rat in a cushy cage. They might have the courtesy to pretend that she's something else, and put her in comfortable surroundings with the illusion of relaxation and personal space, but if she tried to refuse tests and treatments her status would be made plain to her. OTOH, in a warlord state they might not subject her to as many needles and tests, but she might be forced to marry and copulate with the leader of the tribe.

I suspect that neither society would give her much say in how her kid would be raised.

It's not clear to me which would be worse.

EDIT: Some might say that it's obvious that the warlord/tribal situation would be worse, because she'd basically be forced to have sex with the leader, i.e. be raped. That's certainly true if she's kidnapped by the tribe. However, if she was trying to decide which tribe to flee to, she might choose to flee to the one run by whomever she found most acceptable as a mate, and might decide to try being his queen and make herself a power in tribal politics. As bad as that sounds, many people might find it less bad than being a lab rat in a gilded cage. Really, there are no good options when you're a special person in a crumbling world, but the chance to at least get some autonomy and status in a tribe might be better than the material comforts offered by others.

Sorry, Shem, I misunderstood you.

I still don't think I agree with you, but now I better understand what I disagree with.

I can buy a quarantine for her own protection, because in such a circumstance, her continued survival (and that of any children) is very important. Give her whatever she wants, tons of guards around a walled compound, a dozen doctors making sure she and any kids are in good shape, etc.

Involuntarily, though? I don't know. Ultimately, we don't forcibly quarantine healthy people.

As for testing, I'm sure most people would cooperate with quite a few tests in that situation...but what would it take to find the mechanism of her fertility? Such an investigation in the contemporary world with an intact infrastructure could take years, even decades. In a collapsing world, it could easily take the rest of her life. Nor, you know, could we really expect them to follow current protocols on medical testing and human experimentation. Depending on the quality of the doctors, the resources available, and the desperation of everyone involved, she could very well go through Hell for the rest of her life before they resort to vivisecting her.

The impression I got was that it was something wrong with the women. Remember the scene in the abandoned school, when the ex-maternity nurse is reminiscing about the last baby she delivered, and then suddenly she had no new pregnant patients, and the patients she already had all miscarried?

You may be right. It's been quite a while since I read it.

To which the author would probably respond A) that you don't know how comprehensive the solution is; it could be a one-off thing and B) that the solution came too late for it to be of any practical use, with the world already having fallen apart. Either way, the story isn't a good piece of evidence for the argument that you're proposing, I think.

Well, to ad Hitlerum, there's a Hell of a lot of precedent to do a lot of coercive and abusive things in the name of medical health. :) This situation just strikes me as offering a lot more variations on the Mengele side of the spectrum than the Salk side.

Nay, 'tis not. I'm a huge fan of end-of-the-world doomer porn, and for ME to say this movie is bad is like a teenage boy looking at regular porn and saying "I am completely non-horny right now." That's how bad "Children of Men" is.

I liked it. I get the environmental thing, though I think it's undercut by the ending. I haven't read the book, so I can't compare. But the movie was well done, and had some phenomenal bits of filmmaking. I dug the worldbuilding.