...Okay, okay, I'll elaborate. GEEZ.
Yesterday I came across this video. I've only seen the movie twice, and I was only able to pick up
on probably a fourth of the stuff in that video. The various ads, TV screens, and computers in the movie are never on screen for more than a few seconds, and they're pretty much never brought front and center. There are only a few instances where the frame is devoted entirely to some of these ads or news reports. For the most part, the various posters, ads, and so forth are all just glimpsed for a second. Watching them by themselves, it's crazy to note how much detail is actually put into them. They are all produced like real commercials and look like it, not some half-assed thing just to get a concept or image across.
The question, then, is why bother? Why devote so much time and energy to making these ancillary bits that most people won't be able to view for more than a second as they take in most of the scene, if they even notice them at all?
For pretty much the entire movie, we follow the main character Theo, as portrayed by Clive Owen in a badass overcoat. The camera sticks on him, and pretty much never cuts away to show what other characters are doing or other plot developments taking place. The reason we see so little of these ads and all this amazing technology that's been developed in the next twenty years is because Theo just doesn't give a shit. The first scene is a perfect example of this. The movie opens with a news report that the youngest person in the world, the 18-year-old "Baby Diego", has died. In a world where everyone is infertile and humanity is officially terminal, this is a very big deal. But after a few seconds of the news report, we cut to Theo in a coffeeshop packed with people watching the news and looking suitably horrified. Not Theo. He couldn't care less. While we hear the news reporter talking more about what this means for humanity and the next youngest person on Earth, Theo just pushes his way past the throng, not even really bothering to glance at the TV, because he wants his coffee, dammit.
Most of the first part of the movie just has Theo walking around, and it's very clear the Britain he inhabits is not the one we know today. It's essentially a police state, with numerous cities turned into refugee camps for the numerous illegal immigrants fleeing the anarchy that's supposedly broken out in the rest of the world and suicide pills marketed as a comforting alternative to an untimely, unpredictable demise. It's also got technology that, while certainly feasible today, is clearly from a world 20 years ahead of ours where progress suddenly got stunted. Cars have heads-up-displays on the windshield to warn about oncoming hazards and video ads cover pretty much every surface. The director Alfonso Cuarón has called it "science fiction with the wires exposed."
And throughout all of this, Theo maintains pretty much the same attitude as he did in the first scene. He only really cares about politics and the refugee situation when he becomes directly involved, and characters never stop to comment on the amazing new technology around them or when it was invented. In addition, the camera almost never cuts away to focus specifically on some new technological marvel, and instead favors a lot of long, single takes. This helps to keep the action tense, especially during chase scenes, and it also helps to connect the audience with Theo, but that's not what I love so much about this movie.
What propels Children of Men, for me, to great movie status is the fact that this style of editing and camerawork, along with Clive Owen's performance, perfectly captures the way we interact with technology every day. Everyday, I walk around with an iPhone, which is not only a portable phone, but it carries pretty much every song I've ever heard, and can also be used as a map, to tell me the weather, and whatever else I want it to if I feel like buying an app for it. I can also access the internet with it wherever I get a cell signal, which is more places than you'd think.
Now picture going back in time fifteen years, or even ten, and telling yourself about this. Patton Oswalt has a great bit where he talks about this, as does Louis C.K. A lot of people are walking around now with phones that are more sophisticated than many of the computers we'd send up in the space shuttle. And at first, of course, everyone freaked out about it. "Holy crap, this is amazing! I just use my finger to swipe and it's awesome!" I was the same way with mine, but only for the first week or so. After that, everyone was just like, "Yeah, whatever," or griping about how slow it works.
Children of Men works the same way. It's a world radically different from our own in so many ways, and Theo just doesn't care. Like us, he's just become totally inured to everything. The performances help sell this, but the fact that the camerawork also adopts this perspective, of not particularly calling attention to all the crazy stuff going on, is what makes it such a great movie for me. It drives home a second moral, one about the way people can so quickly become accustomed and bored to the crazy world we live in, without cramming it down our throats or talking at us for ten minutes. It's a purely filmic way of doing it (still don't believe "filmic" is a word, but spellcheck isn't calling me on it, so whatever).
Transmetropolitan, my favorite comic book, does the same thing. Technology and the world can change in any number of ways, but at the end of the day, people are still going to be people. It's my firm belief that we're basically living in a work of science fiction at this point (See: unmanned aerial drones, chocolate-chip cookie dough pop-tarts), and if that really is the case, Children of Men is one of the best movies depicting that situation. It's my favorite type of science fiction, one that isn't all about the fantastic setting and technology, but rather uses those to tell a personal, tightly woven and really interesting story.
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