This movie was a real disappointment. I should know better than to believe what everyone else says about a movie. I went to this movie with the expectation that it had a great story. The movie was well crafted, but the story was crap. The movie was based on the book "The Children of Men" by P.D. James. James primarily writes crime fiction novels. I've read a few and have enjoyed them. I haven't read "The Children of Men", but what I've read about the book tells me that the movie adaptation is very different. The one point that the two share seems to be that there are no children being born.
I think what disappointed me most about this movie is that I thought it was very sexist. I hated the fact that every woman in the movie was either killed off by some man or was nearly helpless. For example, it seemed false that the woman who was carrying the only child in nearly two decades was unable care for herself. People were trying to protect her but she didn't seem to do anything to protect herself or her baby. I thought it interesting that she spent so much time with a midwife and didn't seem very prepared for childbirth. I can't be too critical because it is a rather stressful moment, but I would think the midwife would have spent plenty of time coaching her. I also thought it was interesting that she never breastfed her baby. The fact that she had a baby seemed more important than the fact that she was a mother who needed to care for her baby.
I think by far the most disappointing part of this movie was the homage to Die Hard. Who's stupid idea was it to have Theo spend most of the movie in bare feet as John McClain did in the first Die Hard movie? The first shot of his stocking feet squishing through the mud was funny, but the subsequent scenes where the shoes didn't fit and he had to wear flip flops were just stupid.
Ugh, I could go on and on about how much I didn't like the story. I won't even waste my time on the holes in it. (I hope the book is better. ) However, there were some great scenes in the movie. For example, there is a scene at Jasper's where Miriam, Jasper and Kee are talking. The shot is framed with Theo in the foreground in the left of the screen. The other three are in the background on the right of the screen. As Jasper, Miriam, and Kee talk, they begin discussing what happened to Theo's son, Dylan. Theo is listening in on their conversation. As the story unfolds, his expression changes to show how painful the memory is for him. A great moment, and use of the wide shot, but wasn't it redundant? Didn't we already know how deeply he was effected by his son's death through his interactions with Julia? Couldn't more time been spent on developing Kee in the movie? There were a lot of scenes like this where there were wonderful moments that worked well, but seemed to fall short. These moments did not turn the whole into a great movie for me, only one that seemed to focus on one male and his perspective on a failing world. Don't we get enough of that already?
I doubt that I would ever recommend The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift to many people. I couldn't recommend it because I liked it for the cars and the driving sequences. How many people see a movie just for that?
I do because I have had a fascination with cars since I was young. My family had a Chevy Nova. Dad would often take us cruising around town on a Friday or Saturday night. I loved just cruising around and looking out the window at all the other muscle cars. I have even taken my son a few times. Although, cruising in a Saturn Wagon really isn't the same as cruising in a muscle car. You just don't get the jump off the line like they do.
If you have an appreciation for cars and movies about cars, then you'll like this movie. They have muscle cars and the new fangled, tricked-out, street racers. The movie has speed and fancy driving. They do try to have some semblance of a story with character development, but I didn't really care about that so much. The best part, they didn't use some cheesy animation to do the driving sequences. Sure, the close-ups of the actors were filmed in studio with a green screen. But the driving sequences where the cars were drifting were filmed on the street. Some of the bonus features show the drivers and the second unit working. It's very interesting stuff.
You may want to consider watching Lost in Translation and this movie together. See if they portray Tokyo in a similar manner. One thing though, this movie has a much better soundtrack than Lost in Translation.
The light sweeps across the water's surface, searching. It finds the deck of a ship, or maybe a person floating in the water. A rescue swimmer jumps in and helps those that can be helped. What happens to the those that can't be saved? As it was stated in the Gaurdian, "The sea takes the rest."
Movies are like water rescues. The frame that defines the picture is the light. It shows us what needs to be seen, the characters, the action. The director is the one who choses what we see. What goes unseen is left to the darkness.
I doubt the director of The Guardian was trying to convey this in his movie. I think his main goal was to wring every tear he could from the audience. He got a lot out of me. This movie pits youth against experience. The prize is who lives at the end of the story. Does the older and wiser man prevail, or does youth endure? The story is formulaic to a fault. The rookie comes in and gets his chops busted by the older instructor. He somehow earns the older mans respect which enables him to somehow exceed the older one. Classic archetypes. It worked for most of the movie, but the end was disappointing. The end was such that it made me rethink the whole movie, and essentially think it was junk. I hate when you invest yourself in a character, only to have that character die a stupid meaningless death. If you identify with that character, what does that mean for you?
What did make the movie interesting - beyond my opening comments - is that real people do this job. There are really men and women who jump into the raging waters and save people. I thought this was fascinating. Watch the waves crash over the deck of a ship and imagine yourself there, waiting for someone to save you. I love the ocean and the waves, but I will hopefully never lose respect for the power that it contains.
Unfortunately, the action scenes were not as intense as other movies of this type. There were a lot of wider shots and very few, if any point of view shots. Both of these would have helped put you into the action more. But perhaps, keeping us in a somewhat objective point of view on the situation may have helped to let us quietly observe instead of fretting in our seats.