Whatever your plans for the weekend, be sure to include
Children of Men. Not for its vision of the future--which is as imperfect as all speculation--but for its artistic triumph, its moral and emotional weight. The night I saw it I lay awake mulling it over. We've been reading
The Stranger and studying Camus' brand of existentialism in my junior classes. Watching the film, I came to realize that most people evade the true force of "the absurd" because we know life goes on for others, even when we're gone. As Camus writes in "Summer in Algiers," eternity is "what will continue after my death." But we cheat, and call eternity
who. We want to leave a legacy, a culture, a history behind us. But what if there's no one to follow?
For the worst review of the film, read
William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
This movie left me swimming in unanswered questions. How did our species go sterile? Why does this pregnancy threaten anyone? What does the title mean? Most of all, if an army is besieging Seattle, why in the heck is it taking three years to do the job?
He apparently wants a movie to spell out everything in ABC blocks. It's like reading
The Plague and wondering what virus might be implicated.
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