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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

#51

Post by huehehue »

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…

Reminds me of "It Follows". David Robert Mitchell made some pretty interesting prop choices specifically to avoid dating the movie. From his AV Club interview:

> There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by adzm »

duskwuff wrote: post #47
h4nkoslo wrote: post #12

The little touches were the best part of the movie - the nihilist industrial scream-metal music, the Islamic militia in the streets, the plausibly crappy vehicles... Incredible movie.

Fun fact: the "Zen music" from Children of Men is a track by Aphex Twin [1] with a Creative Commons-licensed sound effect [2] dubbed over it. This got quite a bit of attention at the time (e.g, [3]), as it was one of the first documented instances of a major film using CC assets. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLOrgnfW9w [2]: https://www.freesound.org/people/thanvannispen/sounds/9432/ [3]: https://creativecomm…

That really was a fun fact; thanks.

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

#54

Post by duskwuff »

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…

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

-- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. (In an intentional homage to Neuromancer.)

On another tangent: Gibson wrote, in an afterword in an early-1990s digital edition of Neuromancer, that he had never owned, nor even used, a computer until some years after he wrote the book. He noted that:

> Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.

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

#56

Post by dave_sullivan »

walrus01 wrote: post #8

If you haven't seen this movie you absolutely should. And you need to watch it with your face close to a 60"+ high quality screen and with a good sound system. Do not ruin it by watching it on a laptop or mobile device. The extended shots create a near full immersion experience.

It's definitely a movie I wish I could watch for the first time again.

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

#57

Post by dghughes »

scott_karana wrote: post #45
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…

FYI, you mean 21st century: the 20th century is the 1900s :)

That's back when flip phones filled an entire room.

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

#59

Post by iiiggglll »

> 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 planet was born in 2009. But even as a concept, this particular one doesn’t resonate with our current anxieties, because overpopulation is more worrying than population decline.

It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.

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

#60

Post by ssully »

mcphage wrote: post #4

There's one scene in it—and I think people who have seen the movie know the one I'm talking about—that's possibly the most powerful, intense scene I've ever seen on screen. Absolutely worth watching.

Yeah Michael Caine's "Pull my finger" scene - it gets me every time.
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