This is not the first time I watched this film, it is the second rather, but I liked it so much, I picked it up at Best Buy yesterday for $8. It had been on my Amazon.com favorites list for a long time.
The first thing that strikes me odd about this film is that it is portrayed as only 20 years in the future, a world in which the entire human race is infertile and the youngest person on the planet had just died. I think they should have put it at least 50-75 years out to make it a little more believable. The film stars one of my favorite actors, Clive Owen. I am trying to quantify why I like him so much. I am not sure, is it is manliness, his British accent, his good looks? I don’t know, I think it’s because he kicks ass. It also stars Julianne Moore and Michael Cane. Clive gets tangled up with a “terrorist” group which is headed up by his ex-wife, played by Julienne Moore. Her character is killed early on, as it turns out, by someone within the organization. During his introduction to the group, he finds out they are protecting a pregnant woman. Julienne’s character had promised the pregnant woman Clive would escort her to safety, to “The Human Project”, a promise he intends to make good on.
Fast-forwarding to the scene where the mother has her baby. I usually don’t like the scenes in movies where the actress is having a baby, it’s so cliché. But I have to say in this film I actually thought she was really giving birth, and when they showed the baby coming out of the woman’s crotch, I thought she was having a real baby on set. It wasn’t until after the movie, on the scene extras that I realized the baby was entirely done in CGI special effects, well done.
The ensuing action scenes are a big part of the reason I enjoyed this film so much. The scenes with the rebels fighting the military were shot very realistically and the accompanying sound effects were fantastic. There is a scene in which Clive had been separated from the woman and her baby and he went to retrieve them. There was a battle going on and the camera never cut away from the action scene, making for a very realistic five or so minutes of cinematography. This was one of many such single-shot scenes in the movie. The credit has to go to the director, Alfonzo Cuaron. Since the first time I viewed the film, I had forgotten the exact ending, how it went. It ended with a mortally wounded Clive, the mother and her baby on a small boat, rowing away, awaiting a rendezvous with a larger boat to take them to the “human project”. A perfect ending to an excellent film. Highly recommended.
*****
