Outside Context

**SLIGHT SPOILERS**

I have just got back from watch­ing Chil­dren of Men (advert) at the cinema. I will prob­ably write in more detail later, but here are my ini­tial thoughts.

Firstly, this is a great bit of film mak­ing, but tra­di­tional in theme.  It is basic­ally a road movie; that is a movie about going some­where and tak­ing some­thing to someone.  It doesn’t mat­ter what the actual movie is about, vis­it­ing God, catch­ing a boat, going to Iraq, it is all the same.  And as is usual in such films char­ac­ters are cast aside, sac­ri­fices are made, help­ers turn out to be bad­dies and bad­dies turn out to be help­ers.  There is the also the usual “people dying all around” theme.  The “walk through chaos” moments.

For all that though, the action is never less than harrowing.

The moments (and 2nd Dir­ector work) are all very good here.  Also good is the act­ing across the board.  Very good in fact and espe­cially Michael Cane, but then any­one who knows me would know I would say that! 

Once again the great man plays a con­sum­mate char­ac­ter part.  Clive is singled out for his emo­tional depth and loos­ing a little of the zanyness he nor­mally portrays.

Another really good thing is the loc­a­tions.  I recog­nised all the Lon­don ones and the early cof­fee scene is right around the corner from where I work, and indeed very near where the Muslim bombs went off last year.  The Eng­lish­ness was shin­ing through the loc­a­tions and there were many cul­tural ref­er­ences to mod­ern Bri­tain.  From the Bansky in the museum next to the Picasso, to the Lon­don 2012 T-Shirts.  One thing they missed was in a scene where the char­ac­ters had to get out their ID and reached for pass­ports, if they had gone for ID Cards then truly the fin­ger would have been on the pulse.  Nah, on second thoughts I don’t think even this Dysto­pia could ever be that bad…

And Dysto­pia it is.  Oh yes.  A real shit hole the world has become — this is what forced deport­a­tions would get us no doubt — in the end to live in a BB world is to live in fear of those sup­posed pro­tect­ors of that world.  The sub­text to the film, apart form the obvi­ous and slightly laboured mes­si­anic labour, was that after all this world has come to, life is precious.

And worth fight­ing for?  It is inter­est­ing that for a movie full of arms (which I will get to in a moment air­soft fans), the hero’s — all without ques­tion — Don’t pick up a gun in the entire film.

The mes­sage then is peace is can­not be found in violence.

Nature. Nur­ture.

People may com­pare this film to V for Ven­detta but the mes­sage in that work is not the same.  Also miss­ing from this film is the over arcing sense of polit­ics that V battles against.  The gov­ern­ment in this film seems to be one born from the ashes of neces­sity because the world did not find a way of reach­ing out to all man­kind.  It is evil sure, but not defin­it­ively evil like in V.

I guess the mes­si­anic part is con­tained within that.

The “magic bit” is in the film and if you are into it at that point you may well be moved.  I per­son­ally was moved more when the moment­ary peace incor­por­ated a fra­gil­ity that under­lined the entire plot.  Love is strong, hearts are strong but flesh is weak and sac­red.  People are sacred.

Not one then for a broody Girl­friend to see.  You will be pick­ing out baby clothes in a week!

The magic moment was slightly put off for me by the fact that the army fel­lows were in ACU and car­ry­ing what looked like Star SA80 AEG’s.  Still, the main “bad” char­ac­ter had the mother of all tricked out M4’s.  Quite silly really.

The end is what I pre­dicted right from the begin­ning; from even watch­ing the advert for the first time.  There is no great rev­el­a­tion only a sense of a job com­pleted at insur­mount­able cost.

In a world gone mad one man walks the path of peace and pays the price.  I have heard that one before…

I remem­ber think­ing, when the cred­its came up, that I was expect­ing “For God’s sake — Vote Lib­eral” to come up on the screen.

A good film.

8/10