The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music playing in the background, while outside the window there is so much poverty really resonated with me.
I've lived in SF going on 6 years now. My apt complex has private buses that run from here to FDi in the morning and evening. The route sometimes changes but a lot of the time we would go thru the heart of the TL. I'd be half asleep comfortably siting on this Bauer's bus, usually listening to something like Aphex Twin's Select Ambient Works, so not the classic music, but still I would sit there in this amazingly privileged situation and look out the window to all this poverty and despair. It constantly reminded me of this movie.
I worked at Apple for a while, and the same thing, yet instead of my apt complex, it was dozens of Apple buses, shuttling 1000s of people for all over the bay area, and again on the way i'd see so much that really made me think about the current affairs of lots of things that's going crazy in our small little part of the world.
I've since left Apple and joined to a small startup near Union Square/FDi area. I still live in the same apt complex, and they still have the buses running every 15-20 min in the morning, but i don't ride them any more.
I walk the 2 miles everyday to and back from work, and I love it. For so many reasons I love it. One big reason is I don't want to be shielded or sheltered from the real world going on around us. I don't want to deal with the shit on the sidewalk or the craziness that exists in between my spot and my work, but i also don't want to pretend it doesn't exist and try and ignore it.
Sometimes it can be very annoying, hell even scary. But also, A few times it's been amazing rewarding to help someone for 5 minutes. All sorts of little things, I've helped people that can't get their wheelchair from the street onto the sidewalk, or helping the elderly man trying to pick up a heavy box of fruit delivery for his corner store I walk past.
I've had to explain this to some friends that live in apt complex. They take the bus daily and asked why I don't ride it any more, and again it all comes back to the bus scene from Children Of Men.
On a lighter note, I had a good chuckle when the article mentioned that the director deliberately avoided depiction of cellphones to avoid creating an unintentional period piece[0].
The last movie I watched in the treatre is Clint Eastwood's "Sully" and I distinctly remember the main character using a chronologically appropoaite Samsung flip phone and that single prop instantly dates the movie to the first decade of the 20th century. Just as much as Pulp Fiction is locked in the early 90s with Vincent Vega pulling the antenna out of his Motorola brick phone in one exaggerated motion, albeit these choices are probably intentional.
Some long running manga series take another approach by quietly giving its cast the latest gear despite the timeline moving at a much slower pace.[1] It works until you start revisiting the earlier episodes and get reminded of how old the series really is with its depiction of personal electronics.
Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future.
Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input).
There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.
Reminds me of "It Follows". David Robert Mitchell made some pretty interesting prop choices specifically to avoid dating the movie. From his AV Club interview:
> There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.
Blade Runner's production design is beautiful and almost prefectly timeless in its depiction of a future. The only thing that dates the film for me is the cathode ray tubes. They are even in the flying cars I think.
Directors and designers could start using flat blue devices so that interfaces can be re-imagined, in 2-D, or 3-D, and composited in future re-masterings. I like the non-desript tri-fold devices in Westworld. Kudos to the 2001 team for getting imagining tablet interfaces although that did not sway the jury Samsung vs Apple iPad case[1][2].
The first season of Law & Order is delightfully full of these sorts of anachronisms. My favorite is when they bum quarters off passerersby to make a call on a pay phone. This horrible plot device, the phone call, is so entrenched in their writing, they've brought it fully up to date in SVU with everyone carrying iPhones.
Just a reminder to people, All The Tropes is a fork of TV Tropes, but everything is under a free license and has no advertising. TV Tropes uses a nonfree license.[1] The same page is available here: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unintentional_Period_Piece
> The one aspect of the film that doesn’t seem to be coming true is its central premise. The idea is that no human beings have been born in the last 18 years, so when Theo meets Kee, an African woman who is miraculously pregnant, he has to protect her from the various groups who want to exploit her condition. Obviously, we know that this infertility pandemic hasn’t happened: in Children of Men, the youngest person on the planet was born in 2009. But even as a concept, this particular one doesn’t resonate with our current anxieties, because overpopulation is more worrying than population decline.
It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.
It's not about population, and not quite about having no 'future' (though you could say that) - it's about social nihilism and a crises of faith (in the book, literally, in the film, a little more existentially).
The fact is overpopulation isn't an issue, it's a myth.
World population is decellerating at a rapid pace and will begin decreasing within decades. It's painfully obvious to anybody who looks at the numbers. But science fiction has convinced everyone otherwise.
Just look at all the countries with programs trying to entice their citizens to start families and make babies. Governments know its going to be a catastrophe.
Our governments spend money at a rate that only a larger population in the future can afford to pay for. If families aren't producing above the replacement rate, we're doomed.
> It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.
One thing the movie (unintentionally) got right was how absurd this is. It really ruined the movie to me, TBH, because it was laughably implausible. Reproduction is what life does best.
I'll obviously have to watch again for the world building....
If you haven't seen this movie you absolutely should. And you need to watch it with your face close to a 60"+ high quality screen and with a good sound system. Do not ruin it by watching it on a laptop or mobile device. The extended shots create a near full immersion experience.
There's one scene in it—and I think people who have seen the movie know the one I'm talking about—that's possibly the most powerful, intense scene I've ever seen on screen. Absolutely worth watching.
When they exit the building and the chaos pauses for a moment.. absolutely breathtaking every time. It really sold that in the end everyone is on the side of humanity, and everyone hopes for a future. They just couldn't agree on how it should come about.
Even though it's not an "action" movie, it's always my go-to scene for an explanation of what makes a great action sequence. After that, I genuinely felt on the edge of my seat the rest of the movie; anything could happen.
Whatever you might argue about it's prescience, Children of Men is one of the best films of the last decade. The writing, directing and acting are all stellar. It has some of the best single take shots ever filmed. There's a 20 minute running street battle at the end with tanks and explosions that is shot in a single take.
It's also one of those rare occasions where the movie is far better than the original book. Book is ok, film is outstanding.
The reasons you consider it to be such a good film probably have more to do with cinematography than writing, acting or directing. The beautiful shots are a direct result of Emmanuel Lubezki being the DP - the same style can be seen in Birdman, Gravity, The Revenant, and some of Terrence Malick’s films.
Disagree. I thought it was always fighting a low budget, and for me, it never rose beyond the level of a poor mini series. Clive Owen was not good either - he has no real talent.
I love this film and at a certain level, it is plausible (and even natural) that in times of existential fear, societies lash out against outsiders/immigrants.
And yet I have economic quibbles!
In an actual fertility collapse, a highly-developed country like the UK would have an immense surplus of infrastructure, housing, machinery, etc – capital – compared to the dwindling number of new, young workers. Immigrants (of all ages, cultures, and skill levels) could become incredibly economically valuable. In comparison, reliable 'guard labor' to try to hunt and confine immigrants would become very expensive.
Compare, for example, the depopulation of the 'Black Death' in Europe in the 1300's. For those who survived, wages and opportunity grew, and attempts to enforce older rules which bound people to undesirable situations collapsed. Wikipedia suggests that "[p]lague brought an eventual end of Serfdom in Western Europe":
"societies lash out against outsiders/immigrants."
It's not as one-sided as that. Many of the immigrants in the book are essentially 'terrorists', there was a funeral march by a group that is essentially Hamas in the film. Hamas are point-blank terrorists, though they are also a political group.
A 'world on fire' with millions of people flooding into the 'small, stable area' definitely represent a threat to that stability at least on some level.
It's more nuanced take. Almost everyone is a good guy / bad guy, and there is a lot of violence ... in that state, it's hard to have an easy moral compass.
I have to admit that the world the movie depicts does seem quite prescient from today's perspective and the cinematography is excellent, especially those long single-shot scenes (and that particular scene towards the end of the film that other comments have alluded to), but I personally didn't find the movie to be as exceptional as others seem to. In particular I felt that the plot sort of meandered a bit throughout the middle section of the film and I also felt that the fertility pandemic theme was somewhat underutilized as a concept. Still, the movie is definitely worth a watch.
I've been thinking about how familiar Children of Men feels in recent months, especially given civil war in Syria and the wave of nationalism sweeping Western Europe and the United States.
This article is a great analysis of how the film creates this uncanny sense of familiarity. I'm overdue to watch it again.
(On a side note, I just finished reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which resonantes with today's world in a similar way.)
"...Cuarón’s most effective decision was to shoot so many scenes on the streets of London, without adding much except graffiti, litter and all-round squalor."
Actually, I lived around the corner from one of the locations in the film, and remember the film crew coming in and cleaning up the pretty disgusting real filth (human excrement, used needles, etc.) and painting over the real graffiti, replacing it with cleaner pretend filth (scrunched up newspapers and the like) and safer pretend graffiti.
It says fertility isn't an issue today, but it's a little out of touch with today's anxieties; most of Europe and Japan have such low fertility that their native populations are in decline.
The little touches were the best part of the movie - the nihilist industrial scream-metal music, the Islamic militia in the streets, the plausibly crappy vehicles... Incredible movie.
Fun fact: the "Zen music" from Children of Men is a track by Aphex Twin [1] with a Creative Commons-licensed sound effect [2] dubbed over it. This got quite a bit of attention at the time (e.g, [3]), as it was one of the first documented instances of a major film using CC assets.
> But even as a concept, this particular one doesn’t resonate with our current anxieties, because overpopulation is more worrying than population decline.
Yet there are demographers who very much worry about it[1]. They sometimes call it the "demographic winter".
The decrease of birth rates is already observed in most developed countries, and it does not turn into population decline mostly because of immigration, so this kind of reflects to what is described in the movie, even if the movie shows an extreme version of it with a supernatural element (the sudden halt of worldwide fertility).
A good reminder to watch a fantastic movie I haven't seen in a long time.
I do think the author's premise is a little shoddy though. Broad similarities between the state of the world in 2006 when the film was made and today aren't all that shocking. In 2006 the world was far along the path of globalization set forth through policies developed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and championed by essentially every US president and their allies since. The author does allude to this when he writes "In 2006, all of this seemed plausible enough, but perhaps a little strident, a little over-the-top." I agree that in 2006 most (myself included) probably didn't think that globalization would face the challenges that it does today as quickly and dramatically as it has over the last two years. That being said, that nationalistic and discriminatory behavior and actions can result from decades of globalization and tolerance seems more a reflection of a natural (if not unfortunate) pendulum swing between two approaches on opposite ends of the spectrum. Any particular power of foresight on the part of the screenwriters/filmmakers seems to me like a stretch, although the author seems to insinuate this to be the case.
Maybe I'm thinking too much...the movie is really awesome and I need to watch again.
good thread. however, amazing to me that the word "woman" only occurs once in the discussion (to date). To me, that movie is about the destruction (or perhaps, near destruction) of the world due to the things that "men" have created (wars, poverty, etc.), and how only perhaps a woman can save them all from it.
[+] [-] w-ll|9 years ago|reply
The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music playing in the background, while outside the window there is so much poverty really resonated with me.
I've lived in SF going on 6 years now. My apt complex has private buses that run from here to FDi in the morning and evening. The route sometimes changes but a lot of the time we would go thru the heart of the TL. I'd be half asleep comfortably siting on this Bauer's bus, usually listening to something like Aphex Twin's Select Ambient Works, so not the classic music, but still I would sit there in this amazingly privileged situation and look out the window to all this poverty and despair. It constantly reminded me of this movie.
I worked at Apple for a while, and the same thing, yet instead of my apt complex, it was dozens of Apple buses, shuttling 1000s of people for all over the bay area, and again on the way i'd see so much that really made me think about the current affairs of lots of things that's going crazy in our small little part of the world.
I've since left Apple and joined to a small startup near Union Square/FDi area. I still live in the same apt complex, and they still have the buses running every 15-20 min in the morning, but i don't ride them any more.
I walk the 2 miles everyday to and back from work, and I love it. For so many reasons I love it. One big reason is I don't want to be shielded or sheltered from the real world going on around us. I don't want to deal with the shit on the sidewalk or the craziness that exists in between my spot and my work, but i also don't want to pretend it doesn't exist and try and ignore it.
Sometimes it can be very annoying, hell even scary. But also, A few times it's been amazing rewarding to help someone for 5 minutes. All sorts of little things, I've helped people that can't get their wheelchair from the street onto the sidewalk, or helping the elderly man trying to pick up a heavy box of fruit delivery for his corner store I walk past.
I've had to explain this to some friends that live in apt complex. They take the bus daily and asked why I don't ride it any more, and again it all comes back to the bus scene from Children Of Men.
[+] [-] Laforet|9 years ago|reply
The last movie I watched in the treatre is Clint Eastwood's "Sully" and I distinctly remember the main character using a chronologically appropoaite Samsung flip phone and that single prop instantly dates the movie to the first decade of the 20th century. Just as much as Pulp Fiction is locked in the early 90s with Vincent Vega pulling the antenna out of his Motorola brick phone in one exaggerated motion, albeit these choices are probably intentional.
Some long running manga series take another approach by quietly giving its cast the latest gear despite the timeline moving at a much slower pace.[1] It works until you start revisiting the earlier episodes and get reminded of how old the series really is with its depiction of personal electronics.
[0]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionalPeri...
[1]: http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/77/how-much-time-ha...
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|9 years ago|reply
Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input).
There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.
[+] [-] huehehue|9 years ago|reply
> There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.
[+] [-] amiramir|9 years ago|reply
Directors and designers could start using flat blue devices so that interfaces can be re-imagined, in 2-D, or 3-D, and composited in future re-masterings. I like the non-desript tri-fold devices in Westworld. Kudos to the 2001 team for getting imagining tablet interfaces although that did not sway the jury Samsung vs Apple iPad case[1][2].
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/23/samsung_cites_scie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....
[+] [-] numbsafari|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labster|9 years ago|reply
[1]: At least under Stallman's definition of nonfree: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Creati...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] scott_karana|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iiiggglll|9 years ago|reply
It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmokyBourbon|9 years ago|reply
World population is decellerating at a rapid pace and will begin decreasing within decades. It's painfully obvious to anybody who looks at the numbers. But science fiction has convinced everyone otherwise.
Just look at all the countries with programs trying to entice their citizens to start families and make babies. Governments know its going to be a catastrophe.
Our governments spend money at a rate that only a larger population in the future can afford to pay for. If families aren't producing above the replacement rate, we're doomed.
[+] [-] duaneb|9 years ago|reply
One thing the movie (unintentionally) got right was how absurd this is. It really ruined the movie to me, TBH, because it was laughably implausible. Reproduction is what life does best.
I'll obviously have to watch again for the world building....
[+] [-] walrus01|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dave_sullivan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] braveo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphage|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevens32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterphone|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasquinelli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssully|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roryisok|9 years ago|reply
It's also one of those rare occasions where the movie is far better than the original book. Book is ok, film is outstanding.
[+] [-] pavelrub|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeboy|9 years ago|reply
Strictly speaking there's a cut hidden in the middle of it somewhere.
[+] [-] strongai|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reason077|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notdang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|9 years ago|reply
And yet I have economic quibbles!
In an actual fertility collapse, a highly-developed country like the UK would have an immense surplus of infrastructure, housing, machinery, etc – capital – compared to the dwindling number of new, young workers. Immigrants (of all ages, cultures, and skill levels) could become incredibly economically valuable. In comparison, reliable 'guard labor' to try to hunt and confine immigrants would become very expensive.
Compare, for example, the depopulation of the 'Black Death' in Europe in the 1300's. For those who survived, wages and opportunity grew, and attempts to enforce older rules which bound people to undesirable situations collapsed. Wikipedia suggests that "[p]lague brought an eventual end of Serfdom in Western Europe":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
It's not as one-sided as that. Many of the immigrants in the book are essentially 'terrorists', there was a funeral march by a group that is essentially Hamas in the film. Hamas are point-blank terrorists, though they are also a political group.
A 'world on fire' with millions of people flooding into the 'small, stable area' definitely represent a threat to that stability at least on some level.
It's more nuanced take. Almost everyone is a good guy / bad guy, and there is a lot of violence ... in that state, it's hard to have an easy moral compass.
[+] [-] vectorpush|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmelaich|9 years ago|reply
It also felt a bit like '28 days'; after about half-way it went low-budget and lost it's way story-wise.
[+] [-] the_duke|9 years ago|reply
If you haven't seen it, find some time over Christmas to do so. Won't exactly get you into a holiday spirit though...
[+] [-] cardamomo|9 years ago|reply
(On a side note, I just finished reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which resonantes with today's world in a similar way.)
[+] [-] m-i-l|9 years ago|reply
Actually, I lived around the corner from one of the locations in the film, and remember the film crew coming in and cleaning up the pretty disgusting real filth (human excrement, used needles, etc.) and painting over the real graffiti, replacing it with cleaner pretend filth (scrunched up newspapers and the like) and safer pretend graffiti.
[+] [-] joelmichael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbarn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildpeaks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h4nkoslo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duskwuff|9 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLOrgnfW9w
[2]: https://www.freesound.org/people/thanvannispen/sounds/9432/
[3]: https://creativecommons.org/2007/01/17/freesound-sample-in-c...
[+] [-] grondilu|9 years ago|reply
Yet there are demographers who very much worry about it[1]. They sometimes call it the "demographic winter".
The decrease of birth rates is already observed in most developed countries, and it does not turn into population decline mostly because of immigration, so this kind of reflects to what is described in the movie, even if the movie shows an extreme version of it with a supernatural element (the sudden halt of worldwide fertility).
1. https://books.google.com/books/about/Essai_de_prospective_d%...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ramzyo|9 years ago|reply
I do think the author's premise is a little shoddy though. Broad similarities between the state of the world in 2006 when the film was made and today aren't all that shocking. In 2006 the world was far along the path of globalization set forth through policies developed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and championed by essentially every US president and their allies since. The author does allude to this when he writes "In 2006, all of this seemed plausible enough, but perhaps a little strident, a little over-the-top." I agree that in 2006 most (myself included) probably didn't think that globalization would face the challenges that it does today as quickly and dramatically as it has over the last two years. That being said, that nationalistic and discriminatory behavior and actions can result from decades of globalization and tolerance seems more a reflection of a natural (if not unfortunate) pendulum swing between two approaches on opposite ends of the spectrum. Any particular power of foresight on the part of the screenwriters/filmmakers seems to me like a stretch, although the author seems to insinuate this to be the case.
Maybe I'm thinking too much...the movie is really awesome and I need to watch again.
[+] [-] madebysquares|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Upvoter33|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasingtheflow|9 years ago|reply