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“Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

bbc.com

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Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#81

Post by doomtop »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #70
lobster_johnson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would displa…

> "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so when reading that my mind conjures a gray sky, but then again when I was young TVs displayed static if you turned them to a dead channel, not solid blue...

I believe gray sky is the intended image.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#82

Post by cwp »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #23
Laforet wrote: post #20

On a lighter note, I had a good chuckle when the article mentioned that the director deliberately avoided depiction of cellphones to avoid creating an unintentional period piece[0]. The last movie I watched in the treatre is Clint Eastwood's "Sully" and I distinctly remember the main character using a chronologically appropoaite Samsung flip phone and that single prop instantly dates the movie to the first decade of…

Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would displa…

Probably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#83

Post by edblarney »

gojomo wrote: post #63

I love this film and at a certain level, it is plausible (and even natural ) that in times of existential fear, societies lash out against outsiders/immigrants. And yet I have economic quibbles! In an actual fertility collapse, a highly-developed country like the UK would have an immense surplus of infrastructure, housing, machinery, etc – capital – compared to the dwindling number of new, young workers. Immigrants (…

"societies lash out against outsiders/immigrants."

It's not as one-sided as that. Many of the immigrants in the book are essentially 'terrorists', there was a funeral march by a group that is essentially Hamas in the film. Hamas are point-blank terrorists, though they are also a political group.

A 'world on fire' with millions of people flooding into the 'small, stable area' definitely represent a threat to that stability at least on some level.

It's more nuanced take. Almost everyone is a good guy / bad guy, and there is a lot of violence ... in that state, it's hard to have an easy moral compass.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#84

Post by lqdc13 »

SmokyBourbon wrote: post #69
iiiggglll wrote: post #59

> The one aspect of the film that doesn’t seem to be coming true is its central premise. The idea is that no human beings have been born in the last 18 years, so when Theo meets Kee, an African woman who is miraculously pregnant, he has to protect her from the various groups who want to exploit her condition. Obviously, we know that this infertility pandemic hasn’t happened: in Children of Men, the youngest person on…

The fact is overpopulation isn't an issue, it's a myth. World population is decellerating at a rapid pace and will begin decreasing within decades. It's painfully obvious to anybody who looks at the numbers. But science fiction has convinced everyone otherwise. Just look at all the countries with programs trying to entice their citizens to start families and make babies. Governments know its going to be a catastrophe…

It's not painfully obvious to UN or anyone else noteworthy.

Was it also painfully obvious that USSR was going to break up and Russia would have stalled with population growth? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Populati...

None of the current trends made sense 30 yrs ago. And in 30 yrs there could be major geopolitical changes that would make current projections useless.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#85

Post by 467568985476 »

bananash wrote: post #80
mavdi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound clinically insane.

well debate me on video or fight me boxing in real life or stfu. nerd. im totally sane. (and a good boxer and great debater, and engineer. and f* you) google lobotomobile, then go get one plz

How would fighting someone make your ideas valid?

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#86

Post by lobster_johnson »

cwp wrote: post #82
lobster_johnson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would displa…

Probably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.

I think we can give Gibson the benefit of the doubt here and say the point was not the size, but the fact that it was hot RAM -- the contents was valuable. The price of 3MB, even as early as in 1984, was not so high as to make it that impressive even by the standards of the day.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#87

Post by slededit »

hsitz wrote: post #62
numbsafari wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first season of Law & Order is delightfully full of these sorts of anachronisms. My favorite is when they bum quarters off passerersby to make a call on a pay phone. This horrible plot device, the phone call, is so entrenched in their writing, they've brought it fully up to date in SVU with everyone carrying iPhones.

The pay phone definitely reveals you're dealing with an old Law & Order episode. But it's not an anachronism. Law & Order doesn't purport to display a period of time different from the one in which it was made. When you watch a 1990's Law & Order you see the world as it was in the 1990's. For it to show a scene where someone bums quarters for a pay phone is no more anachronistic than it would be for a film/tv-show de…

Law & Order purposely based its stories on topics of the day. It was a show meant to be watched in its time. Future watchers won't get the same experience out of it. That said I still enjoy the older episodes. It's like looking back in time.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#88

Post by labster »

walrus01 wrote: post #72
vidarh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But carrying a concealed micro-sd card with encrypted data would be a lot more convenient. Heck, you could fit many times as much data as in Johnny Mnemonic (40GB, I think?) inside your head too by shoving a micro-sd card up your nose or into your ear.

Nose, ear, really? On a more realistic note, what is the maximum microsdxc card capacity of a human rectum?

A metric buttload.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#89

Post by emmelaich »

vectorpush wrote: post #25

I have to admit that the world the movie depicts does seem quite prescient from today's perspective and the cinematography is excellent, especially those long single-shot scenes (and that particular scene towards the end of the film that other comments have alluded to), but I personally didn't find the movie to be as exceptional as others seem to. In particular I felt that the plot sort of meandered a bit throughout…

I also felt it meandered; the message was not enough to sustain the whole movie.

It also felt a bit like '28 days'; after about half-way it went low-budget and lost it's way story-wise.

Re: “Children of Men”'s vision of the future is now disturbingly familiar

#90

Post by lqdc13 »

naasking wrote: post #33
joelmichael wrote: post #27

It says fertility isn't an issue today, but it's a little out of touch with today's anxieties; most of Europe and Japan have such low fertility that their native populations are in decline.

Every affluent country's fertility rate is below replenishment levels. Their population growth rate is only positive due to immigration. In fact, global population will likely peak around 2050, and then start falling, which will be a whole new crisis. People will look back at overpopulation fears and laugh.

Sure, but why does it stop? It doesn't seem to be a specific population density, but culture + economics.

Like for example, look at this Haiti plot: https://knoema.com/atlas/Haiti/Population-density

It is already 1.5x more dense than Germany. 3x more dense than China. Would it stop? When?

Why is Switzerland 9x more dense than Ireland? Is population of Ireland expected to eventually grow to that of Switzerland?

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