Children of Men

9 comments

1. Gnome Chompsky says:

   December 11, 2018 at 5:42 am

   Hello Trevor,

   I always appreciate your reviews. Have not read this one yet, but will before the cold and rainy night here is out. Avoided the film because of clearly ideologically fueled departures from the novel. One friend thought badly of me for my reasons for refusal to see the film, hasn’t spoken to me since.

   As for the novel, I wonder if Patricia James had read Greybeard, by Brian Aldiss, it has much the same scenario and much the same setting (around Oxford). If she had, I suppose she would ever admit to something as making her own take on someone so cheap as an SF novelist.

   If you have not read Greybeard, I strongly recommend it for comparison. Also one of the many better works of Aldiss (most are great, short or long, but there a few clear failures).
2. Gnome Chompsky says:

   December 11, 2018 at 6:42 am

   Alright, I read the whole.

   You can easily guess that my sticking point re. the film was, easily visible from the shorts, that the somewhat gimpy pregnant character in the novel by James was transformed into a black African.

   As Wanda Jackson once said, Hot dog, that (well, he in the real lyric) made me mad!

   Stating that as the reason for not wanting to view it was also why I was discarded by a former friend.

   I may try to watch it in the future on your recommendation
3. Benjamin says:

   December 11, 2018 at 7:30 am

   The movie was very good, and, has perhaps THE BEST camerawork I’ve ever seen in a movie.

   Like, you’ll have minute+ long scenes with 10,000 things going on in them all at once, wherein none of the actors make a mistake! It is a huge departure from the modern action movie wherein the average “shot” lasts like 5 seconds and everything feels like a really cheap horror movie.

   Initially I thought the movie was total leftist propaganda— but, as the saying goes: “reality is right-wing”. So, even though the film TRIED to be pro-leftist, even the prejudices of the director weren’t enough to make the lefties (e.g., the Fishes) look like Le Good Guys.
4. Peter Quint says:

   December 11, 2018 at 8:39 am

   I tried to watch it once; I lost interest when the pregnant black female appeared, and turned it off. I don’t plan on ever revisiting it.
5. Max West says:

   December 11, 2018 at 9:16 am

   Thanks for confirming that the pregnant woman in the film is Cuarón’s idea, and was not the case in James’ original novel. I had always wondered that, but never looked into it. This travesty completely changes the arc of the story and the symbolism of the pregnancy. James was an ardent Christian; I don’t know if she harbored a Pope Francis-styled Christianity (“3rd world refugees are our salvation!”) or an Anglophilic (and implicitly white) Christianity.

   I’m also curious how other dominant features of the film are depicted in the novel. In the film, the Gestapo-like tactics of the “Homeland Security” police, and the latter’s callous disregard for and disrespect of the illegal immigrants they round up, is ham-fisted, moustache-twirling Hollywood villainy. Many of the illegal immigrants detained (held in small, crowded cages, like animals… get it?) more resemble emaciated, East European, Holocaust survivors than they do Muslim immigrants, an obvious attempt to draw some sort of misplaced historical analogy. (It appears the refugee & DHS themes were entirely Cuarón’s doing.)

   As I recall, the radical, Antifa-like, terrorist group called ‘The Fishes’ are a militant group of Leftists claiming to be an ‘immigrants rights’ group. I read it as something of an insurgency-coalition formed between radical Muslims and the radical Leftists. Doing the illegal immigrants’ bidding, they are the source of much of the film’s bloodshed. Thoroughly paranoid in their conspiracy-theorizing, they blame coffee shop bombings not on Muslims (or Leftists) but on the government. (The sequence with the trigger-happy, dreadlocked wigger is particularly terrifying.)

   From a purely technical point of view, Children of Men contains some brilliantly choreographed, single-shot sequences, the most famous being a six-minute-plus scene in which the protagonist Theo is first captured by The Fishes, narrowly escapes their clutches, only to flee to an even more dangerous situation involving government tanks and artillery. It is a most impressive sequence and had to have been a nail-biter for the Director and all involved.

   I’ll never forget first seeing the movie’s extraordinary, penultimate scene, where we see a Hezbollah-like, ragtag (but uniformed) parade of Muslim insurgents marching through an embattled, mostly destroyed cityscape. Before we actually see them on screen, complete with green, Hezbollah-styled bandanas covering all but their eyes, we hear their uniform chants echo through the alleyways: “Alluha Akhbar!”

   “James also predicts the rise of Left-wing terrorist violence, which makes sense, since Leftism is a form of religion for unbelievers.”

   I’ve long been surprised we haven’t yet seen leftwing suicide bombers here in the West. (Paul Schrader’s recent film First Reformed, with its radical green agenda, entertains this as a rational course of selfless ‘activism’.) The requisite level of religious fervor on the Left certainly exists, as does other religious trappings. If one compares our current socio-political scene to that of the late-1960s/early-1970s, the rhetoric of hate and extremism by the Left then is certainly matched by today’s rhetoric, but there’s a notable deficit in the respective levels of political violence. In today’s scene, we’ve had nothing like the organized terrorist attempts of the Weather Underground and their ilk. (For comparison: in an 18-month period between 1971 & 1972, the FBI counted an estimated 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost 5 per day.) Similarly, while BLM has inspired some targeted killings, we are today experiencing nothing like the urban riots of the late 1960s (Watts; Newark; etc.)

   Mitigating factors taking place today include the different and plentiful flavors of Soma we now have (internet-based entertainment; Netflix; cell phones), the more decentralized ways in which people ‘meet’ (online groups vs. organized physical meetings), and the embodied narcissism (‘the world revolves around me and my feelings’) intrinsic to leftist identity politics, one that perhaps eclipses necessary levels of self-sacrifice.

   In time, though, as the religiosity of Political Correctness (with its dogma of anti-whiteness) intensifies, and the bleak nihilism and meaninglessness of hedonistic ‘expressive individualism’ becomes readily more apparent, extreme political violence will likely become manifest.

   1. Benjamin says:

      December 11, 2018 at 11:38 am

      Testostsrone levels have decreased roughly 1% a year, every year, for at least the last 50yrs.

      That would be a big reason for the drop in violent crime in America, as well as a decrease in political violence / terrorism.

      The average Jewish communist circa “the good old days” was, comparatively, a raging bull alpha compared to the average Westerner in 2018
6. Jeff A. Marlatt says:

   December 17, 2018 at 12:41 am

   I viewed the film years ago. It is worth watching regardless of your political views. But Trevor, you bring up some interesting ideas in your review. Which leads me to ask this question of you and your fellow racial realists; If the White race were to go extinct, would you prefer that humanity in another form, be it Black, Asian, etc. continue on or would you prefer all of humanity to go extinct as well ?

   1. Greg Johnson says:

      December 17, 2018 at 3:32 am

      I would hope that other forms of life would continue on the planet, human and non-human.

      The movie is, of course, ambiguous on this point. But if the future of humanity is going to be African, then unlike the hero of the movie, I would not risk a single fingernail to ensure that fate.

      Frankly, I would be more concerned about the survival of non-human wildlife.

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