Recently I went on-line and found a best twenty-five modern science fiction movies list. And I went through it and found half a dozen movies I hadn’t seen. And I gave the list to Camera Girl and told her to submit it to her friend the local librarian to get me the DVDs through interlibrary loan. Well, the only movie they had the first day was “Children of Men.” Last night we watched it. Oh boy.
I knew that it was a dystopian alternate history movie where humanity become completely infertile. What I didn’t know was that with the exception of Michael Caine I would hate everyone in the movie. It takes place around London in the year 2027, I think. London is stewing in a smoldering revolt by the illegal immigrants that are being deported. The plot revolves around a pro-immigrant terrorist group that has found an immigrant girl who is pregnant and the attempt to assist her to escape to an international group called the Human Project that intends to cure the world’s infertility.
I won’t go into a lot of detail because this isn’t a review. It’s just a rant. Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor play main characters and I found myself disliking them ever more deeply throughout the movie. Basically, this is a pro-immigrant, anti-western civilization diatribe with environmental hand-wringing thrown in for good measure. And the whole film is ugly, brutal and depressing from start to finish. When it was over I apologized to Camera Girl for not shutting it off after the first five minutes. As I mentioned I liked Michael Caine’s character. He’s an old hippie-stoner which isn’t great but it is Michael Caine so he makes him lovable. But that’s hardly a good reason to watch this mess.
Well, I guess I should go back to that list and get a better idea what the rest of the movies are really going to be like. If the guy who made this list thought this was a good movie, then his judgement is certainly suspect from my point of view. You know, if all of a sudden, every woman on Earth became infertile, I’m guessing that all of the biologists in the world would be working on that problem night and day and I’m pretty sure they’d at least figure out what the cause was. In the movie they don’t even know that. This alternate history is so depressingly bleak that I can’t see why anyone would make this movie. I’m left with the idea that this was some kind of moral lesson to let us know that not treating illegal immigrants like members of the family is so evil that Gaia will punish us by making us sterile and wiping us off the planet. That isn’t science fiction. That’s propaganda to make the Left feels virtuous. The only part of the movie that I liked was at the end where the protagonists are leaving a battleground where the immigrants are battling the British Army and suddenly a few fighter jets go overhead and rain down death and destruction on the immigrants. I think I gave out a little cheer.
I’ve found too many of “Modern Science Fiction, Video and written, are just dystopian socialist screeds with little entertainment value, and often very little “science” mixed into the fiction. Usually, if the words “Global Warming crop up, I shut it down and move on to something else. I really wish Hollywood could be trusted with material like Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, Heinlein’s Future History, or AB Chandler’s Rim Worlds. Unfortunately, the suits want Social Justice Warriors, not Space Explorers. PS: If you want to see a society based on life extension for the elite at any cost, read Larry… Read more »
I’d like to see a good action CGI rendering of a Puppeteer. Or maybe a Kizin or a Protector.
While I’m at it, you wouldn’t happen to have a General Products hull or two you’d like to sell?
Do you know what can get through a GP hull?
The Tide!
And visible light lasers, specially modulated to shut down the power plant that holds the hull together…
Well, I may know someone who heard of somebody with a possible contact to a girl named Peace who might have a couple of #1 hulls she can spare. You ever heard of the Home colony? Yeah THAT one!
Science fiction today is too corrupted by those that spent substantial parts of their youth playing video games.
That is true. But one way to improve the situation may be to make better video games from better science fiction stories.