Alfonso Cuarón
Producers:
Hilary Shor
Iain Smith
Tony Smith
Marc Abraham
Eric Newman
Screenplay:
Alfonso Cuarón
Timothy J. Sexton
David Arata
Mark Fergus
Hawk Ostby
Music:
John Tavener
Cinematography:
Emmanuel Lubezki
Editors:
Alex Rodríguez
Alfonso Cuarón
Production companies
Strike Entertainment
Hit and Run Productions
Distribution:
Universal Pictures
Release dates:
3 September 2006 (Venice)
22 September 2006 (United Kingdom)
25 December 2006 (United States)
Running time: 109 minutes
Budget: $76 million
Box office: $70 million
BASIC SYNOPSIS
This film was set in the future of 2027, when no children where born for 18 years. Infertility threatens to mankind to become extinct. The last child being born has become a fight for the survival of the earth’s population. Clive Owen faces down his own demons and protects the planets last remaining hope from danger.
FILM ANALYSIS
Children of Men stands out from typical dystopian sci-fi movies. Popular and commercially successful films such as Minority Report 2002, Blade runner 1982, portray dystopian worlds in a futuristic and escape from the characteristics of modern society. However Children of Men shows a more negative version of the 21st century modern society.
The unique approach allows the audience to relate to modern day society and therefore the audience can relate to the movie in a deeper way. The character that had played Julian in the movie (Julianne More) quoted ‘the audience doesn’t come to see you, they come to see they come to see themselves’. The directors unique techniques brings the audience along on the thrill ride with vivid images of the future world.
Through out the trailer there is slow pace editing, with a total of four cuts. It makes the audience feel as if they are part of the film and reels them into the action. Further more there was three static shots and on rails, each of the shots is hand held and close to the upcoming action.
The mis-en-scene in the film is very dark and dingy. The surroundings in the background are dark and gloomy for example in the café there is dirty and gritty in the inside. There are dark grey building and the scenery and had been dimmed, low level lighting which made the atmosphere sad and gloomy. There is a lot of general demolished environment filled with garbage and torn posters on the walls. The main character pours alcohol into a cup; this action is stereotypically shown in a lower class society.
The sound in the film is also mostly diegetic and has sounds of cars and commotion. With the upper class people and there fore leads to continuing the portrayal of the destroyed society. This draws the audience in because it makes the film, as it is nicely resemble the slow motion images in the background. Along side the diegetic sound there is also dialogue of the main character and the news reporter telling the narration of the plot to give the audience a clue of what is going on. When the explosion kicks out there is debris that continues to ass to the debris on the street and people on the streets are seen to be wounded. The explosion is followed by more energetic music causing more tension between the audience and film.
The film takes place in the year 2027 when Britain stands alone as the only functioning government in the world. Why does Cuarón choose Britain? Why not America, Germany, France or some other country? It appears that Britiain is not a coincidental choice by Cuarón. According to Slavoj Žižek, a renowned continental philosopher and critical theorist, one of the possible explanations is that Britain’s government has a de facto constitution and works, according to Žižek, based on “substance of tradition” and history. The picture on the left was drawn for the Times Higher Education Supplement about the "precedent, pageantry, mythology and phantasm that is Britain’s unwritten constitution”.
Theresa: www: you have a lot of detail which informs the target audience
ReplyDeleteEBI: you should add more pictures to make it more attractive