Bonus points for any of you who can say the make and model of the car that license plate is found on in the movies.
Today ran away from me. Busy at work. But I wanted to take a sec and blog about the movie I watched last night: Children of Men. If any of you are looking for a fantastic sci-fi film that takes its sci-fi seriously, look no further. Of course, if you have issues with brutal dystopian societies rife with violence and profanity, then maybe you ought to look further. Still, the film is superb, and I can’t believe it took me this long to get around to it. It was so much more real than most of the sci-fi flicks you see these days. It really focused on “what if,” then took that “what if” scenario to the extreme, exploring the implications of a situation and then presenting a fully fleshed out world based on those implications. Fantabulous.
How about you? What are some of your favorite realistic sci-fi movies. None of this Star Wars/Star Trek stuff. Gritty. Real. Do tell–I’d like to see how many I’ve seen, and if I’m missing out on any.
Well, the make is a DeLorean. Don’t know the model off the top of my head. (Google gives me the answer: DMC-12.)
I haven’t seen Children of Men, but I had believability issues based on what I saw in the trailer. I have no problem with the basic “what if,” but I hard a hard time believing the apparent reaction to the “what if.” (Maybe the movie gives a sufficient explanation.)
A movie I thought did a great job of exploring a “what if” was Gattaca.
Gattaca was a good one, no doubt. But it didn’t feel as gritty and real to me as Children of Men. What do you mean when you say you had a hard time believing the reaction to the “what if”? Do you mean the way society broke down because all women went infertile? If you can clarify that a bit, I might be able to answer you better.
The main thing I meant by my compliment to Children of Men was that it wasn’t necessarily about why the world deteriorated, or even why women went infertile. It simply set up a scenario and made that scenario real. As in, “I could believe there could be a world like this” sort of thing. In many sci-fi movies, I never really buy that life will turn out to be that way. Either the sci-fi is so far in the future that I just can’t connect as much, or it tries and falls short, like I, Robot or Minority Report, which is more or less to be expected (too Hollywood). But even Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner didn’t do this as well as Children did. Part of this might be because it’s more recent, so it can play on things I know better, whereas the other classics are playing on their times, which I wasn’t a part of. Maybe I’ll have to do a “dystopian movies” post sometime to discuss the good ones and bad ones.
I had no problem with society breaking down because all the women became infertile. But the trailer implied that a major point of the plot was “this one woman is pregnant and we’ve got to keep it secret and protect her as we take her to someplace safe.”
Now, maybe the trailer gave me the wrong impression, but that just seemed ridiculous to me. The vast majority of people feel protective towards pregnant women. And in a world where women have gone infertile and everyone’s pretty much lost hope for humanity, I would think news of a pregnant woman would be greeted with joy, and at even a hint of danger to her, people would be lining up to help protect her.
I can see how the trailer would have given that impression. It’s wrong. But the whole point of keeping her secret and safe is so that she and the baby can have the hope of a normal life, without being seized for political purposes by one of the many factions in the world at that time. And there are quite a few scenes where the baby and girl are treated with the sort of approach you outline. But as with anything, there are plenty of people with plenty of different ideas about what should be done with that baby.