Please don't take it personally, it's just my thoughts on a film
It's okay, I figure that, good as it is, it's not for everyone. I just figure that if you dislike it for reasons that I can argue against then I might as well throw in my two cents.
Let me explain:
I had high expectations for Children of Men as you highly recommended it and I respect your taste in films. I remember putting it into the DVD player and telling my wife, "this is going to be a good one, it's a deep psychological, sci fi movie"
But I didn't see anything special in the film. Sorry, but other than lots of chase scenes and gun battles, I really didn't get much out of it. You should know, I find almost all lengthy chase/fight scenes boring, so it's not my type of movie. I'm not saying it sucked and if a person likes that sort of thing then it works well.
Yeah, I believe I addressed this in that there weren't actually that many chases or gun battles. There were two major lengthy action sequences - the car scene about a third of the way through and the finale - but otherwise nothing major. It's okay to not like sequences like that, but you seem to assert that the film was made up primarily of those, which it really wasn't. The bulk of the film actually does consist of scenes that are driven by character and dialogue without that much in the way of overriding tension.
I didn't make a connection to the film, I didn't care about the characters, I didn't care about the story, I was never emotionally invested. I would have liked more on the Human Project element and the exploration of how society change with zero births....Yes it did mention that but not in a way that seemed relevant. It was as if the higher loftiness ideas were grafted onto a action sci fi film.
Ah, well, that's a whole other thing. One of the best things about
Children of Men is how it didn't go over-the-top in its development of a childless society, but a large chunk of it was rooted in background details that bled over into the main narrative in a believable manner. There was the implication that much of the world had descended into chaos as a result of the pandemic and that Britain had maintained some degree of stability due to its incredibly fascist anti-refugee regime, which was extremely relevant to the story since not only was the first human baby being carried by such a refugee but that part of the heroes' escape involved breaking into a refugee camp.
The Human Project's near-irrelevance to the plot at large ends up being an extension of the film's meditation of the nature of faith - it's revealed that not even the people in contact with the Human Project know if it genuinely exists (with it being explained that communication with the project is achieved through a series of messengers to the point that it might very well be fabricated) and that the entire mission is based on the presumption that it
must exist, because otherwise what are they even fighting for? Having the Human Project exist as some ultimate and potentially impossible goal rather than a significant factor in the plot served the plot better as a result (especially when its existence was actually revealed at the absolute end of the film, and even then there's no telling whether or not their motivations were genuinely altruistic considering how untrustworthy the rebel group actually turned out to be). The fact that Clive Owen is willing to give up everything and die for this possibly hopeless cause is what matters.
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