Children of Men
Sam Adams writes:
[Children of Men]’s thematic clumsiness is all the more stark in contrast to its dazzling visual sophistication. Shadowing his progressively engaged protagonist into a series of increasingly dangerous encounters, Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki stage the movie as a succession of virtuosic long takes which are indisputably among the most breathtaking in the history of the medium. I hesitate to say too much about them in specific, since they tend to occur at key moments in the plot, but it’s worth saying that they’re as graceful as they are purposeful. Technique-minded viewers will count the minutes without a visible cut (a few edits are camouflaged by CGI or whip pans), but it’s surprisingly easy to get swept up in the graceful bob and weave of Lubezki’s camera movement. Even when he’s not following Theo into combat, as he does in the most elaborate and outright jaw-dropping of the movie’s sequence shots, Lubezki treats the future like one big battle zone.
Right. I think the key to Children of Men is that it doesn’t really have anything brilliant to say about society. Anti-immigrant paranoia is bad? We knew that. Y Tu Mama Tambien suffered a little from this too - I got the sense that it was saying something about Mexico at the turn of the last century, but the statement itself went over my head.
Viewed as an action/adventure movie, however, Children of Men is a genre-redefining masterpiece. The action sequences might be the best since Saving Private Ryan. A scene of a guy in a motorcycle trying to shoot some people in a car that’s driving as fast as its reverse gear will allow doesn’t sound like something for an “arthouse” film, but it turns out that if you apply “arty” quality to it, it’s a lot cooler.