Director: Alfonso Cuaron
As I've written before, films about a dystopic future have to have a lot of things go right. They have to avoid clunky exposition, the world created within has to be believable and internally consistent (not necessarily realistic), and then there's all the normal hurdles a film has to jump to succeed. It may have just been my mood, but I didn't get into Children of Men. It's clearly much better than I am rating it. There's brilliant action setpieces, a general feeling of dread, and some inspired direction. I guess my criticisms come down to Clive Owen, who I didn't like, and his character development, which I felt was haphazard. Dystopian films are usually over 120 minutes - this one wasn't, and I think it suffered for that. We don't get a full sense of his world before we get thrown down the rabbit hole.
I agree about Clive Owen and his character's development. But that's not really the point in a proper dystopic future film, is it? I thought the world created was *extremely* believable and internally consistent. That, combined with the exact virtues you mention, was plenty to make me a big fan of this one.
ReplyDeleteI've also been using this film's story as an argument against Hobbesian political theory. Why? All the self-interested incentives that are supposed to give us reason to support a commonwealth are the same whether women are having babies or not. But the realm we saw here, in which the commonwealth collapses when women stop having babies, seemed highly plausible to me. Conclusion? We need to be able to project the commonwealth (or whatever the large collective project is) beyond our own lives to be sufficiently motivated to order our lives towards its support.
"I agree about Clive Owen and his character's development. But that's not really the point in a proper dystopic future film, is it?"
ReplyDeleteWell, no, but I couldn't really get into all the late-film action as a result.
"We need to be able to project the commonwealth (or whatever the large collective project is) beyond our own lives to be sufficiently motivated to order our lives towards its support."
I'm not recalling why this contradicts Hobbes. I mean, there's plenty of reasons to not like Hobbesian political theory. The sense from the film seems to be that nihilism sets in once society cannot propagate itself. Is that more what you're implying, that society can't maintain law and order without a sense of the future?
It isn't just anti-Hobbes-in-particular, it's anti-Hobbesian framework. The Hobbesian framework I mean is the one according to which we enter into and uphold some kind of agreement that constitutes society. We enter into that agreement for the same reason we'd enter into any agreement: we think it's better for us to be in the agreement than not to be. So self-interest is the motive that leads to the formation of the commonwealth.
ReplyDeleteThe idea suggested to me by this movie is that self-interest is not sufficient motivation to enter into the agreement, because people who do not see the commonwealth persisting beyond their own lives are not sufficiently motivated to uphold it. In other words, even if we allow that self-interest *is* served by agreeing to enter and uphold the commonwealth (and whether it is or not is commonly argued about), it looks to me like serving self-interest is insufficient motivation to do so.