Children of Men Essay 4

In this action-tapped film director Alfonso Cuarón has derived a tale from a similar book by P.D. James. On screen Cuarón creates a poignant hyper stimulating piece depicting an unknowing world’s journey to save one woman and capabilities she is developing while fate sneers with impending doom. The future is rot with dystopic hysteria and our heroin Kee holds the key to continuing the reign of mankind on planet earth with the help of the noble hero Theo. The audience is bombarded with visual and audio over stimulation. During a number of intense scenes I felt myself leaning towards the edge of my seat, heart-racing anticipating what horrific outcomes might come from the current predicaments our heroes were in. This film throws you onto a death defying roller coaster and before you know it half of the cast has disappeared into the ash of a tumultuous fire.

I very much enjoyed this feature even though my personal preference does not usually coincide with tragic doomsday death appeals. I consider this film a fair lesson in perseverance for a valiant cause. My favorite scene is quite possibly the most brutal and sensually offensive in which Julian is viciously murdered as they troop begins their voyage. The entire scene is done in one shot using a specially designed camera to reflect the reactions of each person in the car and everything happening outside of the car. You feel the intense danger immediately following the shot that eventually kills Julian. The motorcycle assassins are so close to the getaway car you can see they’re facial expressions and as they pull in closer to take another deadly shot, with deadly ninja reflexes Theo whips his door open and the motorcycle simply disappears like magic from the cameras view. This is a small victory for our heroes as they begin to discover the world cannot be trusted. Fate offers up a five-course meal of knuckle sandwiches with barely any time to breathe in between.

While digesting this interesting story and film I began to ponder what the author/director meant to imply by the title of both book and film. The statement “Children of Men” is powerful and carries a strong connotation based on socially excepted ideas of what defines a man. Logically it alludes to a description of the progeny that is a direct production of the male gender. As I tried to relate this definition to the films storyline I began to have trouble making a connection. Through outside research of popular movie reviewers such as Robert Ebert I soon realized that the book and the film have a distinct but entirely influential discrepancy. One scene in which Theo and Miriam discuss the human infertility problems facing their society strikes me as a highly influential dysphemism for popular American culture. In the scene Miriam explains to Theo how she began to realize there was an infertility problem among humans. Miriam recalls the slow process of failed pregnancies until one day there were no new reported ones and the pregnancies that were known were complicated. The word began to spread that no pregnant women anywhere across the world were coming to the obstetrician’s office. Eventually the world could only remember a faint whisper of children’s laughter. Miriam’s vital description relates our brains to process this information with the conclusion that the film’s current infertility conflict was a result of female complications. While the movie does not directly make this statement it does a fine job planting the idea seeds into our heads. Ironically the James novel describes the infertility problem as a direct result of masculine infertility. By rendering the male half of the species as infertile, the idea is that men are verifiably inadequate, or deficient and weak is easily perceived and therefore counteractive to the perception of strength one might get from the captivating title. Now that I know the book was written with different context of infertility I am able to understand the bold significance explained by the title. However it is unfortunate that modern American cinema makers allow their own insecurities with masculinity to diminish the value of a phenomenal thought-provoking piece of art.