Children of Men

⭐ 9/10

This one has been on the list for a while and did not disappoint. Roma is an all time favourite of mine, so it was cool seeing another Cuaron movie.  Lots of the same flourishes, with the breathless long takes, but the subject matter here could not be more different.  This is a world where no baby has been born for 17 years.  No reason is given, but the world is in turmoil.  Such a great sci-fi premise, and I love the lack of detail it gives you.  This bleak world is enough.

There are a couple incredible action sequences, and the final one I have no idea how it was done.  So much is happening, so many explosions, I just don't know how you can make something like that happen and have it look that good. And then you throw a pregnant woman into all of it and the stakes are sky high.

I was playing Last Of Us Part 2 at the same time and there were a ton of parallels, not just the apocalyptic violent world. The movie feels like that game plays, set piece to set piece with no time to breathe in between. There are a ton of thematic similarities too, but the long takes make it feel like that video game in a lot of ways.

I don't have a lot of negatives, mainly that this movie is so bleak that I can't imagine revisiting it. Immigration is a huge part of the movie, so its very relevant right now. The other movie I kept thinking of is Looper, where it has a perfectly distilled sci-fi world and tells a story that allows you to explore that world without over-reliance on exposition. The level of detail poured into the story and production of the movie is what I want in all my movies. Oh, Civil War too.  One memorable thing from that movie was how loud and scary every single gunshot was, and this movie has that too.  The stakes feel so incredibly high. Finally, this movie has a harrowing birth scene, and after being in the room for the birth of a child scenes like this will always move me.

Not a perfect movie, but at its highest points there are not many movies better than this.