Children of Men
2006 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child's birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.
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For all the theories about how covid might have been some conspiracy in China... (I'm more inclined to believe a hybrid, they didn't have a program to develop any weapons out of it, but would EASILY buy a coverup to try to hide the shame of yet another seasonal virus that turned out to be more)
What if this sort of research leads to some prion like disease that either works like a slow acting (fast to spread) neuro-toxin, or a scenario like the Children of Men movie?
Containment and risks need to be considered.
Will we discover life extension technology before we stop having children and humanity simply dies off? Between Altered Carbon and Children of Men, I feel like that's a book and a blockbuster movie waiting to be written.
'Children of Men' is probably the best contemporary example of this - appalling book that informed a piece of cinema that's basically beyond reproach.
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
"""I have an idea for a movie club, where two movies with a tenuously connected theme are watched (separately) and then discussed. If you've seen the movies "XXX", and "YYY", tell me what is similar about them, what's different, what are some possible "connected themes" and who tackled the topic better?"""
...time passes...
"""Now that you understand the idea behind these pairings, recommend five more pairings, but don't give any hints as to their connections, just five bullet points with "A vs B" movie titles. Bonus points if there is at least a 10-year gap between them, and they are both not box-office blockbusters (but make sure they are slightly more popular or recognizable movies, not exclusively low-distribution non-critically-acclaimed indie movies)."""
* Children of Men vs Snowpiercer * Lost in Translation vs Frances Ha * No Country for Old Men vs Hell or High Water * The Prestige vs The Illusionist * Drive vs Nightcrawler
...I know guidance is "don't just post AI output", but this is specifically a human-to-human discussion around novel(?) ways to interact with AI/LLM's. I've found they're _really_ good at conceptual-venn-diagrams.
There's a book "Algorithms to Live By" (ie: look for matching socks via BFS/DFS or whatever). Asking the AI: "you know a bunch of algorithms, what are the top three that should have been in the book?" => "what are the weakest that could have been removed?"
Recently during performance reviews, we had to write our self-assessment and had guidance from on high like: "make sure you talk about people skills, technical skills, customer impact, etc." ...so yada yada: "I'm so amazing, I'm so great" => "Dear AI, I've been given this guidance `...`, please compare my handcrafted storytelling against the guidance `...` and tell me where I have missed covering a requirement" => "...now please give help w.r.t. simplifying or cleaning up the section on $INCREDIBLE_TECHNICAL_ACHIEVEMENT b/c I was focusing on describing my personal impact, but need help making it more digestible for others".
The combination of instant, tailored feedback and the fact that they've read the whole internet, "watched" every movie (read the script, read critics reviews, reddit, forum discussions, etc), read most published books, and that they're 80%+ plumbers, doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc. make them an unstoppable research assistant, especially when crossing connections that would normally be "expensive" to do so.
Example: ask a [doctor+lawyer+plumber] about the health and legal impacts of lead solder in pipes or whatever. Instead of needing to schedule 3 people's times, wait for them, pay them, etc, you can get instant "free" feedback, educate yourself, and then have a more solid foundation to branch out from there. Such incredibly useful tools!
It's Children of Men crossed with The Big Lebowski, with Pynchon instead of noir characters. When you get what it's trying to do, it gets better.
I bounced off of it at first, but I bounced (hard) off of Lebowksi as well.
I don't think it's PTA's best film (or that I will come around to that opinion eventually), but it's pretty good.
My first thought was about Children Of Men
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
(Which is a harrowing, yet brilliant, film)
A real classic. As an author who was asked by my publisher to perform my own audiobook:
1. There is a reason 'reader of audiobooks' is a profession - it is stupid difficult. I will never do it again.
2. I loved this tape so much. It does such interesting things with its soundscape (from memory - if it actually is just Gibson reading it, then he must have embedded those memories through the sheer brilliance of his performance.
3. My fiancee is partially-sighted (I see her as an investment that will appreciate as biohacking becomes more and more prevalent) and she reads mostly by audiobook.
It's not really how I prefer to read - I get distracted too easily - but I've been appalled at the production quality of what I've overheard. While Gibson's work is a special case, an audiobook is only one dimension away from a film adaptation.
4. Literally all my millennial-Gen-Z-cusp friends who are non-readers opted for the audiobook of my book, not the book-book. Anecdata, but interesting. They would just switch Rogan or whatever out during their commute until they felt they'd listened to (what I assume as) enough of it to be socially acceptable.
5. I have no market knowledge other than that I signed my audiobook rights away to my publishers in the industry-standard way.
6. I'm sure it'd be very easy to procure data that made a case for audio fiction that was well-produced and incorporated soundscape-like elements, being incredibly commercially successful. It strikes me as a form that is ripe for innovation. And everyone loves books on tape.
7. There has been so much really interesting innovation in 'aural mood amendment' over the last decade or two. Some of it seems like pseudoscience, some of it seems legit - I wish I had sources to share. Apologies that I don't.
8. I assume someone has already built this concept - well-produced, soundscape-driven longform audio fiction - I'm not a consumer of that market well enough to know it. It'd be a really, really fun project. I'm sure it'd be very tough to get profitable, but it's almost too fun to care. This could be another reason it doesn't exist.
9. Gibson's 2003(?) novel Pattern Recognition is insanely underrated - probably not by people here - but I think the prose is better, and in a decade or two it will feel just as (if not more) prescient. It's a really, really good example of a literary classic that didn't get attention from book dweebs because it's from a 'genre' guy. If you like Neuromancer, and want to think about the next couple of decades in a similar way, you will really love it. I always thought it'd make a great double-bill with the movie Children of Men .
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
it's not black and white. Unlimited growth is bad but negative population growth unchecked means the end of modern civilization as we know it.
Right now we have negative population growth and it is not controlled negative growth. We did not intend for this to happen nor does anyone know how to stop it. So logically speaking; If the background context and status quo remains the same expect this trend to continue past criticality.
Even before that imagine not being able to find a job, product prices rising. Hardships, starvation. Ever watch the movie Children of men?
Depends on what you're doing, right?
Let's take video streaming. I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s. This also doesn't account for any buffering. This is one of my smaller 4k videos and more typical is going to be 3Gb-5Gb (e.g. Oppenheimer vs Children of Men). Arrival is pretty dark and a slow movie so great for compression.
Now, there's probably some trickery going on that can get better savings and you'll see used with things like degrading the quality. You could probably drop this down to 1.5Gb and have no major visual hits or you can do a variable streaming and drop this even more. On many screens you might not notice a huge difference between 1440 and 4k, and depending on the video, maybe even 1080p and 4k[0].
For comparison, I loaded up a 4k YouTube video (which uses vp9 encoding) and monitored the bandwidth. It is very spiky, but frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. You could probably do 2 people on this. I think it'd get bogged down with 4 people. And remember, this is all highly variable. Games, downloads, and many other things can greatly impact all this. It also highly depends on the stability of your network connection. You're paying for *UP TO* 300Mbps, not a fixed rate of 300Mbps. Most people want a bit of headroom.
[0] Any person will 100% be able to differentiate 1080p and 4k when head to head, but in the wild? We're just too used to spotty connections and variable resolutions. It also depends on the screen you're viewing from, most importantly the screen size (e.g. phone).
The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US companies with US culture in them.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
I don’t care if the normies dont do long shots. The best movies have very long shots. Children of men or 1917. Until AI video gen can get past 5-10 second shots of slop, we won’t see any major critically acclaimed AI movies or related.
Children of Men was a documentary.
"Strange Days" is set in the days leading up to new year's eve of the Millennium. O:-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txG9rOW8Jx0 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Beyond_the_Stars -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
- Ghost in the Shell (1, then 2)
- Children of Men
- Stalker
- Solaris
- Blade Runner 2049
- Devs (a brief tv show, but just one shot the whole series)
- Contact
- Under the Skin
- Paprika
- Annihilation
- Arrival
- Ex Machina
- The 5th Element
- The Substance
- Primer
- Tenet
- Upstream Color
- 12 Monkeys
- Her
Actually reckoning with this stuff leads people into believing in anti-natalism, negative utilitarinism, Scopenhaur/Philipp Mainlander (Mainlander btw was not just pro-suicide, he actually killed himself!), and the voluntary extinction movement. This terrified other philosophers like Nietzsche, who spends most of his work defending reality even if it's absolute shit. "Amor Fati", "Infinite Regress/Eternal Recurrence", "Übermensch" vs the literal "Last Man". "Wall-E" of all films was the modern quintessential nietzschian fable, with maybe "Children of Men" being the previous good one before that.
You're literally not allowed to acknowledge that this stuff is bad and adopt one of the religions that see this and try to remove suffering - i.e. Jainism, because at least historically doing so meant you couldn't use violence in any circumstances, which also meant that your neighbor would murder you. There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions
Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!
They made a movie about it already Set in 2027
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
A Children of Men (movie 2006, novel 1992) development...
We do proper apocalyptic books and films in the UK! If you survive "Threads" and "When the wind blows", why not wash it down with some dystopia! 1984, Animal Farm, Children of men.
Other apocalypses and dystopias are available. The UK is not the sole source of them. 451F, Brave New World ...
I'm actually reminded of the movie Children of Men, which seems much more of a realistic view of a dystopian landscape in UK over the next 20-50 years.
The first time I noticed how bad the fast cuts are we see in most movies was when I watched Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón, who often uses very long takes for action scenes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men#Single-shot_sequences
Children of Men - 2006 - society would fall apart without a fresh supply of humans, this movie made that very, very clear
The Discovery - 2017 - The thought that we keep doing things over in an imperceptible manner until we get it right, is haunting
Ferris Bueller's Day Off - 1986 - "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." - It told me I could be a little less serious about things, and have more fun
About Time - 2013 - The lesson is to try to roll with whatever happens, and relax
I talk about many of these things and get labeled as a "Conspiracy theorist", particularly when you start observing that these are all known endocrine disruptors, that testosterone and sperm quantities are in free-fall among men world wide, and that precocious puberty is becoming normalized in girls simultaneously.
But the moment that you bring up how there might be a environmental/biological component to the extremely rapid increase in LGBT identification, particularly in the youth, they think you're Alex Jones. Sorry, no. I'm simply someone who internalized the message that movies like "Children of Men" were sending.
Yeah =/ I always think of those commercials for that suicide pill (Quietus?) in that movie Children of Men... the only retirement I'll be able to afford (maybe), lol.
The best films have long takes. Children of men or stalker come to mind
Art isn't all pretty landscapes and pictures of boats (though those are nice too); sometimes it's challenging and though provoking and that episode is certainly one I remember. I've often said "Children of Men" is the best movie I'll never watch again, and while I wouldn't go so far as that on Black Mirror episode 1, I won't be watching it again either.
While I agree with the other comments and don’t find Children of Men all that believable, if we take the “magical” premise of the film of no new kids anywhere, I have found it one of the most gripping tales ever put on film.
The expanse in my mind comes closest in its attempts to portray a realistic future, with its power dynamics and problems, in the “humans are humans and will take our problems wherever we go” kinda thing. Books better portray this than the show, but the show is also a must watch.
>A musician once told me that it was the sound of your ear getting damaged and when you hear that you'll likely never hear those frequencies again.
This is a line in the film Children of Men (highly recommended), can't remember if it's in the book but either way it isn't correct.
For those who don't get the reference: It's from the movie Children of Men.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2VT2apoX90o&pp=ygUPY2hpbGRyZW4gb2YgbWVu
There are several doomsday movies that predate The Road, were better at the time, and hold up far better today, IMO. Children of Men (2005) would be my top suggestion. The rare movie I've gone back and watched multiple times. You know why it's good? Because the central premise didn't come true (humanity is infertile), but we live in that dystopia now anyway. It's like Black Mirror but for the police state. It didn't go into hyperbole like The Road or The Day After Tomorrow. It was a realistic, slow-motion apocalypse. Going out with a whimper instead of a bang.
However, Children of Men is admittedly not as bleak as The Road, so not a fair comparison. If you really want a film that produces bottomless despair in the viewer, I recommend Threads (1984) instead. It was produced by the BBC on a shoestring budget, and yet it's still a better film. I can't say I recommend it, but if you do watch it, the ending is on par with Requiem for a Dream for being memorable and filled with doom and horror.
The Road just wasn't very good IMO. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand? Same writer, different genre, but excellent.
The film Children of Men missed this part from the book, which is regrettable because it was such an interesting little world building piece.
There's a lot of great picks here, such as Gattaca, Man from Earth, Contact, The Matrix, Wall-E, Children of Men, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys. I would add Truman Show.
Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
Ghost in the Shell, Sunshine, Children of Men, 12 Monkeys, Edge of Tomorrow, Moon
The Expanse show/books are great
I’m waiting til 13 for Akira
Mine is 11 and matrix, terminator, back to the future, arrival were all too slow. He liked the Jurassic Park books but the movie was “too hokey.”
Arrival - best science fiction movie in recent memory (maybe ever?)
Ex Machina - also great.
Her - different style, but still very good (also with recent LLM developments maybe closer than we think).
The Martian (not as good, but entertaining)
Also I know parents have their preferences, but 12 seems old enough for any of this (if they’re reading Asimov)
I was disappointed in interstellar (but it is a beautiful movie) just dumb in a lot of ways and the “but what above love” subplot really annoyed me.
I’d give gravity an honorable mention. The director’s other movie Children of Men is one of my favorites but doesn’t really qualify as scifi.
For shows, the expanse is probably the best recent thing.
I’m not sure if Super8 qualifies, but I think that’s a generally underrated movie.
I have a facination with disaster movies. 2012 and The Day after tomorrow are other faves of mine. The holy grail of those movies for me though is Children of Men.
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
Thanks for the response. While I hadn’t read the novel, I thought Children of Men was an excellent film and your comment had piqued my curiosity of how the film’s story came about. I found the following interview by Film Maker magazine¹:
> Filmmaker: How did you become interested in adapting and then making Children of Men?
> Alfonso Cuarón: It was when I realized that the premise of the book, the premise of infertility and humanity, could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope that I feel humanity has [today]. It was an amazing opportunity.
> Filmmaker: I also read that 9/11 was a motivating factor to wanting to do this.
> Cuarón: Definitely. I was trying to cope with the reality we’re living. Even before September 11th things were changing. The big phenomenon of globalization that started becoming so obvious in the ‘90s was really having a lot of repercussions. That was pretty much what I was trying to explore.
> Filmmaker: Your adaptation of the novel is quite loose. How did you approach your source material?
> Cuarón: Once we decided to do this exploration on the state of things – and you don’t have to go very far to realize that the environment and immigration are pretty much on the top of the list – then we had to craft a story. I had the story I wanted to tell so clear in my head that I was very afraid of reading the book and getting completely confused. I read an abridged version of the book, and Timothy J. Sexton, my writing partner, read the [entire] book. But our whole idea was lets find out what elements are relevant to what we’re doing and lets disregard what we think is irrelevant.
I don’t think I’d call that bragging. It seems more like Cuarón had a set of ideas he wanted to explore and the book was a suitable hook on which to hang them.
¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20081009182846/https://www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/online_features/hopeless_future.php
I couldn't agree more.
LotR and the MCU have shown that when you respect the source material, you get incredible movies which are popular and long lasting. For some reason, Hollywood still thinks they can hire directors and writers who want to put their own spin on things and disrespect both the material and the audience and make adaptions like iRobot and Foundation (among many others) which are simply horrible. Even Steve Jackson fell down this hole with (to me) nearly unwatchable Hobbit trilogy.
It's not about the adaption per se - you always need to make drastic changes to transform one medium into another - it's about understanding what makes the source material great. Instead you have directors who pride themselves on having never read or seen the original. It boggles my brain.
Sometimes it works - think BladeRunner or Children of Men - but for more popular stuff, the first thing producers should do is hire a group of fanboys/fangirls to educate them on what makes a particularly loved story great and what changes would not only be unwelcome, but insulting.
Children of Men, the 2006 film by Alfonso Cuarón, depicted a dystopian future where nation states had broadly collapsed, triggering mass migration to the only country which retained a viable system of governance, albeit under a form of fascism, the United Kingdom.
It's a great movie, I hope it is not prophetic, but it is hard to see how it might be otherwise
I find it interesting that Idiocracy was released the same year. Two very different films, but I think two of the most prophetic of their time, and I enjoyed them both a lot, but I always say that "Children of Men" is the best movie that I'll never watch again.
This is a good analysis. It would be great to see a more in-depth write up of this. I hope you complete that.
My current theory of the moment that I just came up with on this thread so I should probably think it through more but I mean, if we just want to make our goal lots of children again being born, and all we need to do is have some largish, global disaster wipes out a significant portion of the population, but not too much to Dent the exponential dynamics of having billions of people already and then just like after every big die off, there’ll be a baby boom.
(Also, let me just add that children of men is a fantastic film.)
Plus, it would help if cultures become more celebratory and enthusiastic about relationships in general, rather than sort of pessimistic or, risk focused as it seems they are now.
Also, if humans develop some spacefaring technology, we could make a campaign to create babies, encourage people to do so and incentivize them because we need people to go out and colonize our local area in space.
> When The Men, Sandra Newman's sci-fi novel in which everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly vanishes from the face of the earth, came under fire for what critics termed the "transphobic" implication that people with Y chromosomes are men, one of the chief questions was whether the author had engaged a trans sensitivity reader.
Could movies like Children of Men be made today? Would it be seen as anti-trans because it doesn't account for trans men? It's one thing to say there is sex and there is also gender. But the current trend is toward denying sex and only ever talking about gender.
Total Recall has it all: The rather bloody action and shooting, the gimmicks (digital nail polish! Live X-ray scanners!), abstruse ideas and images (Kuato lives!), Arnie delivering zingers with an Austrian accent. And then, once you grow up and read Philip K. Dick, you actually understand how much of his ambiguous mind games made it into the movie, and watch it a couple of times with that additional perspective. There are very few films which deliver similar amounts of cinematic joy, unfortunately. The last two that I watched were Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, and surprisingly a Tom Cruise film, Edge of Tomorrow. Both highly recommended if you like Total Recall.
Ah, I see.
Well, my first experience of hip-hop and rap was very shocking. It seemed completely crude and disgusting to me, especially all of the gang violence expressed. I was deeply confused as to why so many people were enjoying this new "music" and my immediate thought is that there must be racist white media owners pushing aggressive propaganda to fuel fires of blacks fighting each other.
Later in life, I learned to appreciate rap slightly more with the sharp political expressions of Public Enemy, the heart of Arrested Development, and the sick hilariousness of Too $hort.
Intelligent, meaningful lyrics, complex melodies, and innovation in general seemed to take a back seat at this time. The same was reflected in films. The quality of all media just felt like it was in decline.
Quit watching television and most movies soon after and never looked back. My favorite "modern" movies are Ex Machina, I Am Mother, Children Of Men, and Sorry To Disturb You.
My favorite current bands are Ladytron, Marsheaux, Electric Youth, and Maps (the best!):
https://mapsmute.bandcamp.com
Indeed, my country town life was absolutely awesome, along with growing up with a young single "hippie" mom who loved me fully and set me free. It was a perfect balance of endless nature in sunny weather with tons of friends along with rapidly advancing technology that felt empowering.
We were no longer just being merely consumers of media, yet able to get inside those screens and speakers ourselves.
Wish more people these days would jump in with us:
https://vavrek.com
I thought the movie implied this as well?
I include Arrival alongside Children of Men as an example of a case where the movie is better than the book (and I'm a big Ted Chiang fan) - changing the daughter's death from a climbing accident to a disease was much better imo.
The best 'faith based' stuff focuses on the content or experience, not Disneyfied characterization of the Bible.
U2 is a Christian band, they make Gospel music. They just stopped saying that back in the 1970's but if you look at their lyrics it becomes immediately obvious. In fact, blatant. Literally their hit song "He Works in Mysterious Ways". They don't even hide it, yet, nobody is really aware.
That to me is mind-blowing: how something can be so obvious, right in front of our eyes, not even denied ... and we don't see it.
Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood is 100% Ministering without apparent Ministering.
'Children of Men' is possibly my favourite film, it's literally a Nativity Story.
... but the last thing on the planet I would ever want to listen to is a 'Christian Band' that calls themselves a 'Christian Band'.
> While I think the bassic narrative skeleton of the story is important, what is equally important is the world building that comes with it.
Case in point: Children of Men is basically a two hour-long escort quest. It's also an absolutely amazing film with amazing storytelling.
> Children of Men was off by only a few years then
For everyone else:
[In 2027, after 18 years of total human infertility and global depression, the world is on the brink of collapse and humanity faces extinction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men#Plot)
So according to the movie it started in 2009. The movie was released in 2006.
Off topic tangent: "Children of Men" is also a great litmus test for search engines. Searching for "movie without babies" in Google yields "Children of Men" as the first result (and has since before 2010). Other search engines generally return movies about babies and stuff like that
I don't have any data but I wonder if stuff like this will affect the gene pool. If the cause is environmental then it shouldnt have an affect. But genes are weird considering epigenetics.
Almost like the the movie 'Children of men'
On this topic I can recommend the dystopian movie “Children of Men”. It’s about modern world of basically our time where nobody can get children and what issues arise.
Children of Men: My favorite movie.
La Haine (1995)[0]: not so much that I saw it differently, more that I felt less crazy for seeing it as it was. I come from those exact areas and times, and even twenty years later there is a terrible amount of similarity in how things are unraveling.
Children of Men (2006)[1]: for the combination of cinematography and the dystopian atmosphere.
Departures / Okuribito (2008)[2]: the subtlety and elegance of the Japanese touch when brushing against Life and Death.
Persona (1966)[3]: I can and can't wrap my head around this movie. I think it left a trace on me in a way that my conscious self doesn't address but the subconscious plays with.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)[4]: there are few things that can put a person against their own mind more than the locked-in syndrome. There's a lot of confusion, humility and strength to find in such apparent helplessness and lack of control. I think of it when I encounter people with ALS or other neuro-degenerative illnesses, and I think of it when I explore my own journey throughout the depths of mental illness.
Amour (2012)[5]: when you go through certain inevitable journeys with people you love, there's so much to be found in the most essentially simple things.
I'm sure there are other impactful things out there but my memory is pretty spotty at times.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060827/
[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/
[5] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1602620/
"It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." -- Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek
below a quote from "Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative" by Mark Fisher - this is a devastating but interesting read on this subject. (I just finished this last week).
pdf: https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf
"> Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it."
highly recommend.
So this is how Children of Men becomes more of a documentary...
> things you can binge watch for a month?
this should get you through March :) ...
The Seventh Seal (1957) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050976/
The Last Man on Earth (1964) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058700/
The Omega Man (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067525/
The Andromeda Strain (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/
Dawn of the Dead (1978) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/
Outbreak (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114069/
12 Monkeys (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
Cabin Fever (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303816/
Resident Evil (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120804/
28 Days Later (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/
Children of Men (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
28 Weeks Later (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/
I Am Legend (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/
Blindness (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
Carriers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0806203/
Daybreakers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/
Black Death (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181791/
Contagion (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/
Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4500922/
World War Z (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816711/
Maggie (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1881002/
Train to Busan (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/
The Girl With All The Gifts (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/
93 Days (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5305246/
Cargo (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3860916/
It Comes At Night (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4695012/
Rabid (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5628902/
The Hot Zone (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4131818/
edit: There is actually a Wikipedia page for the genre (duh!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_viral_outbreaks
I saw this movie before!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
It’s frankly shocking and disturbing how many people are celebrating the collapse in fertility worldwide. This should be a sign that something we’re doing is very very wrong.
Plus population is expected to plateau around 9 billion so we’re not actually being threatened by overpopulation anytime soon.
I can’t help but be reminded of the movie Children of Men.
Children Of Men is a great movie on this topic, you can give it a watch.
But I'm genuinely curious about people that think like you. Okay, so everyone dies by about 2100, then what? What is the point of basically anything?
Children of Men, The Incredibles, Inception, Toy Story, Lala Land. Just a few off the top of my head.
I'm not sure what genres you like but I cannot imagine you haven't enjoyed a significant number of movies over the past two decades.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. In retrospect I didn’t think much of Children of Men or Gravity either, and I can’t even remember what I thought of Y Tu Mamá También, so it apparently didn’t leave much impression on me. Maybe he’s just not my cup of tea.
My upset with Roma was given how critically acclaimed it is, I was expecting a lot more. I appreciate your perspective but I still don’t think the film is worthy of the praise it’s been given. I went and read a ton of reviews after to try to understand what I might be missing and I just ended up getting more and more annoyed. Oh well.
I'm sure there's a great movie to be made about Cleo's life, from her perspective and showing us more of the underbelly of Mexican society at the time. My - admittedly half-assed argument - is that Cuarón might have not had that movie in mind, and analyzing the film as "Cuarón screwed up by not making the film I wanted to see" misses that point.
I wish I had seen way more about the ship that comes and picks up the baby and her mother at the end of Children of Men... but the movie wasn't about them.
Has anyone seen the movie "Children of Men"? I realize mosquitoes hardly, if at all, share dna with people but my imagination immediately jumped to wondering what if modified mosquitoes managed to spread their sterility to humans? Mosquitos are nature's ideal assassin of mankind. Arming them with the seeds of our despair would be a great misfortune.
Im about to fully read Mark Fischer's "Capitalist Realism" [0]. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zerobooks+capitalist+realism&t=ffab&ia=web
And also "uncontrolled and unsustainable" living standards growth. When you have huge portions of world population wanting to live like in the west, and not only for basic stuff like hygiene and schooling. And meanwhile people are decrying that we're too many, too many people are born. Which basically translates to more women should take more pills. Children of men, the movie, comes to mind.
I thought Children of Men was basically a HL2 episode.
For the record anyone who hasn't seen Children of Men, do yourself favour and find it. One of the greatest and most underrated films of the last decade.
Edit: Oops turns out its 11 years old. Better make that the last two decades then. I'm gettin old
I don't think search is as simple as grepping a ton of files. Search Google for "movie where people can't have babies" and the #1 result is Children of Men. I think that's one area where Google pulls ahead of its competition is accurate results to vague queries like that and I think you need a lot of collected data from searches to provide that.
Part of the problem is that we actually don't know what tomorrow will be like, so it's hard to pick the right soothsayer, if you will. Maybe another movie got the smartphone thing right but you never watched it.
Rather than Blade Runner, I think Children of Men will turn out to be a much more prescient vision of what's to come. (Not the main plot line but everything surrounding it.) But like I said... we don't know.
Just like the movie Children of Men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Honestly, it's like Theresa May watched the first hours of V for Vendetta and Children of Men respectively, and mistook them for instructional films.
Are you talking about the book? My wife read it and said it wasn't very good. The movie was great but I wouldn't call its gritty, near-future dystopian setting very cyberpunk either. Cyberpunk is generally "high tech, low life" but 'Children of Men' doesn't really have high tech. 'Minority Report' is more cyberpunk than 'Children of Men' (but still not that cyberpunk).
Absolutely! Children of Men is one of my all-time favourite movies.
While the cinematography is a master stroke, it's not enough to carry a film seeking some level of depth.
I feel Children of Men succeeds because all of its elements - the direction, acting, art direction, writing, score, editing & cinematography - come together so well.
There are many films that get some of these elements right, far fewer nail all of them.
Whatever you might argue about it's prescience, Children of Men is one of the best films of the last decade. The writing, directing and acting are all stellar. It has some of the best single take shots ever filmed. There's a 20 minute running street battle at the end with tanks and explosions that is shot in a single take.
It's also one of those rare occasions where the movie is far better than the original book. Book is ok, film is outstanding.
Zizek's short analysis of Children of Men echoes this. "The true focus of the film is there in the background".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE
Slightly OT but pertains to "Children of Men"
The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music playing in the background, while outside the window there is so much poverty really resonated with me.
I've lived in SF going on 6 years now. My apt complex has private buses that run from here to FDi in the morning and evening. The route sometimes changes but a lot of the time we would go thru the heart of the TL. I'd be half asleep comfortably siting on this Bauer's bus, usually listening to something like Aphex Twin's Select Ambient Works, so not the classic music, but still I would sit there in this amazingly privileged situation and look out the window to all this poverty and despair. It constantly reminded me of this movie.
I worked at Apple for a while, and the same thing, yet instead of my apt complex, it was dozens of Apple buses, shuttling 1000s of people for all over the bay area, and again on the way i'd see so much that really made me think about the current affairs of lots of things that's going crazy in our small little part of the world.
I've since left Apple and joined to a small startup near Union Square/FDi area. I still live in the same apt complex, and they still have the buses running every 15-20 min in the morning, but i don't ride them any more.
I walk the 2 miles everyday to and back from work, and I love it. For so many reasons I love it. One big reason is I don't want to be shielded or sheltered from the real world going on around us. I don't want to deal with the shit on the sidewalk or the craziness that exists in between my spot and my work, but i also don't want to pretend it doesn't exist and try and ignore it.
Sometimes it can be very annoying, hell even scary. But also, A few times it's been amazing rewarding to help someone for 5 minutes. All sorts of little things, I've helped people that can't get their wheelchair from the street onto the sidewalk, or helping the elderly man trying to pick up a heavy box of fruit delivery for his corner store I walk past.
I've had to explain this to some friends that live in apt complex. They take the bus daily and asked why I don't ride it any more, and again it all comes back to the bus scene from Children Of Men.
> The one aspect of the film that doesn’t seem to be coming true is its central premise. The idea is that no human beings have been born in the last 18 years, so when Theo meets Kee, an African woman who is miraculously pregnant, he has to protect her from the various groups who want to exploit her condition. Obviously, we know that this infertility pandemic hasn’t happened: in Children of Men, the youngest person on the planet was born in 2009. But even as a concept, this particular one doesn’t resonate with our current anxieties, because overpopulation is more worrying than population decline.
It's not really about population -- it's about having no future, which is something a lot of people constantly worry about.
Fun fact: the "Zen music" from Children of Men is a track by Aphex Twin [1] with a Creative Commons-licensed sound effect [2] dubbed over it. This got quite a bit of attention at the time (e.g, [3]), as it was one of the first documented instances of a major film using CC assets.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLOrgnfW9w
[2]: https://www.freesound.org/people/thanvannispen/sounds/9432/
[3]: https://creativecommons.org/2007/01/17/freesound-sample-in-children-of-men/
I've been thinking about how familiar Children of Men feels in recent months, especially given civil war in Syria and the wave of nationalism sweeping Western Europe and the United States. This article is a great analysis of how the film creates this uncanny sense of familiarity. I'm overdue to watch it again.
(On a side note, I just finished reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which resonantes with today's world in a similar way.)
Children of Men is one of my all-time favorite movies. Top 3 I think.
If you haven't seen it, find some time over Christmas to do so. Won't exactly get you into a holiday spirit though...
I agree with all of these but have to add some, because you are missing a lot of the classics.
- Alien (talk about classic Sci-Fi Horror)
- Westworld (watch the movie before the show. Trust me)
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- The Thing (I've only seen the old one)
- Moon
- Children of Men
- 12 Monkeys
- Gattaca
- Blade Runner
- Dark City
- Akira (anime)
- Primer (my favourite time travel film)
- Interstellar
- Black Mirror
- Psycho-Pass (anime)
And of course everyone needs to watch - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Totally agree. Have you ever seen the movie The Imitation Game? There's a great quote from Turing's character when he is talking about being picked on and beaten up by bullies at school - "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying"
It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
The only reason we try to eschew and condemn such violence in modern society is because it is in our best interests and more productive to society as a whole to not be like that. No other reason. If we all lived in fear and were huddled in our homes in small communities we wouldn't have even half the modern luxuries we do today. Plus, on the larger scale, if it's war you are talking about - well, they cost a lot of money/resources. So they are tough to maintain for the long haul without noticeable economic harm.
People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Hate and anger run deeper than most imagine. And they motivate people like nothing else in this world, except perhaps fear.
The one and only reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because we have figured out a way that we can all survive. If that were to crumble, you can be damn sure society would look a lot closer to The Walking Dead or Children of Men than Star Trek.
In a few movies, often as dystopic backdrop
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2016/jun/22/monty-python-children-of-men-battersea-power-station-films
> film "Children of Men"
From a P.D. James book, for those more print-oriented
( clicky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men )
I haven't seen any references to the film "Children of Men"; that film freaked me out deeply, and is a bit similar to this issue with the Zika visus. Basically, it depicts a world in the near future where no human children have been born for over 18 years (and europe full of refugees, society breaking down into a police state dystopia)
Hearing entire countries advise women to not get pregnant is really scary!
Children of Men the movie, except the main plot with all women becoming sterile of course.
Seems like a bit of a cheat to include films that have the world building be overly reflective over current day problems/anxieties, but still.
Everyone has different opinions but what was crap about it. Directed by the visionary behind Children of Men, which won best picture and rather than just making a bunch of easy films he spent 4 years making this one.
The cinematography required new innovations in ways to film space scenes. New rigs and such they invented that stuff on the production budget. The acting was top notch. It was stunning.
The cheesy stuff? The unrealistic parts of it? Maybe you could criticise those aspects of it, but they were intentional sacrifices made so the rest of the film could be fresh, new, attainable. The story arc was like a mini rollercoaster, never slowed down. I cheered for our protagonist.
Movies like that don't come out very often.
It's a borderline masterpiece my dear friend. A masterpiece I tell you. One of the prettiest looking things I've ever seen in Imax. It made me have feelings inside. I rated it as one of the best movies to come out in decades.
I think part of a film like that is the spectacle of it. It's probably harder to enjoy on a cellphone, is that what happened?
It's worth contrasting against contemporary SF films that don't stylistically tie themselves to the past - look at Sunshine with its touchscreens, or Children of Men with the hyperflat TVs, or minority report with the gesture-driven holograms.
And yet: something that bothers me about that book/movie is that its portrayal of the labor/immigration dynamics seems exactly backward.
Without a fresh supply of young workers, but with all the factories/tools/capital/housing that supported a larger population, the benefit of incremental workers becomes gigantic.
The winning regions in such a scenario would be those that welcome massive immigration to maintain production.
Even assuming some xenophobic fear arising from the uniqueness of the zero-fertility situation, nations like the UK or US, that already have the benefit of worldwide adoption of its language (and cultural exports), and functioning beachhead immigrant communities of all types, would in such a scenario be most likely to recognize that immigrants could soften the pains of a population-shortage.
Keeping immigrants out would require even more of the dwindling population wasted on 'guard labor', and even more empty buildings/communities and idle factories. And to the extent that there are culture clashes – there's now plenty of space to congregate in voluntarily-segregated communities, but still within the same national boundaries for easier trade.
So while I loved a lot about the 'Children of Men' story/movie, its economics were all wrong.
Are you sure Children of Men is the movie you meant to reference? Seems like an odd future to aspire to...
I love this quote about art and engineering, music and film. Spot on. So as a startup founder, filmmaker, musician - here's my question: how are you ever gonna get these blockbusters/chart toppers without taking a chance. The biggest film in the U.S. right now (Gravity) is by a Mexican filmmaker who made arty films like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men - not hollywood stuff. Really breakout, worldchanging, consumer, Apple-style stuff is made by weirdos, punks, poets and freaks. With all the capital A16 has to deploy - why not create a fund for some of the crazy ones?
Well, since the only thing I know about you is that you're on HN, and you haven't told us what you like or don't, or what you've already watched, you're going to get a load of essentially mainstream sci-fi. But that's your own fault.
Cypher - apparently unpopular with everyone except me, but I found it a very stylish, PKD-esque exploration of identity.
The Prestige - this one you'll probably hear elsewhere. It's mostly about the lengths to which someone is willing to go to be the very best at what they do - which obviously has some relevance for the HN crowd.
Watchmen - the only movie I watch again and again. It might be different for those who lived through it, but I love the way it can effortlessly evoke a very different era, cold-war paranoia, vietnam... a real sense of change.
Children of Men - arguably this shouldn't qualify as exceptional, and there's a lot less to say about it. What it is is some very good straight-up action, and then underlying that is a tale of how people respond to the inevitability of death. It's a simple film at heart, but I found it a very moving one.
Princess Mononoke - again, a real sense of the times changing, of conflicts that have to be resolved not by returning to the status quo but by moving forward somehow. Moral complexity everywhere, with no side being outright good or evil. And a beauty to it all even amidst the violence.
STILL sticking with that absolutely horrific name, I see? You should seriously give out DVDs of the film as rewards.
How about a sleeping pill named Quietus[1]?
[1] Children of Men reference, film version
Always used to be Children of Men and/or La cite des enfants perdus. First is the most intense movie I have ever seen, some scenes literally blew my mind. Latter is very dark whilst beautiful and sweet, like Amélie but better - more techfriendlly.
-------------- Don't really like trailers, but still --------------
Children of Men: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VT2apoX90o
La cité des enfants perdus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSPmtX5KzEw
It's not that most current AAA games or movies are good, it's just that I think we tend to see past ones with rose colored glasses, and to compare best of "the past" (decades) with "the present" (a few years), which is clearly unbalanced.
I was never a big fan of playing games for their stories or characters; I value gameplay over almost everything, preferring mindless fun (e.g. Metal Slug) or multiplayer games, but Portal 1 & 2 are certainly better than most of the big budget games I remember playing.
As for movies since the 2000, sure you have crap like those, but you also have decent movies like (from the top of my head) the Coen brothers', the Eternal Sunshine, Mulholland Drive, Children of Men or Crash. Were the previous decades much better? I don't think so.
Someone in a Reddit comment coined the term 'glasshole', likely in reference to the type who walk around with the bluetooth piece talking loudly about 'important' things.
For those who have seen the film Children of Men, there's a scene in there of a young man in a nice apartment who is playing video games on a strange, futuristic headset which, if I remember correctly, somewhat resembled Glass. He looked like he had psychological problems.
We're getting closer and closer to Surrogates/Gamer/Sleep Dealer/etc, something I'm not excited about at all.
A three season HBO series I'd say. The actual evacuation, the event, and the reality a few years later. Directed by someone like Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men). I know there are dozens of cheesy movies out their covering the subject, but this angle maeon3 is suggesting is really interesting!
Great movie about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Seriously though what is the problem, we have large complex societies and fertility drops dramatically. There's a natural limit and Malthusian ethics of genocide and eugenics are unnecessary. Good news all around.
Children of Men here we come!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
That's one of the things I love most about Children of Men. It's clearly meant to be a realistic portrayal of 2027 (given the circumstances of the setting). The movie was made in 2006, but the main character wears a London 2012 hoodie. The futuristic elements are extrapolated from real things - the advanced, high res computer screens, the stylization of the cars, etc.
You know, when I posted the comment about Children of Men, I was worried the topic might veer off into film critique.
The article shows BING & GOOG'S search results for "the film where no new babies are born"
BING returns gibberish results, GOOG returns an IMDB link to "Children of Men", the perfect answer.
But one search out of billions is easy to gimmick, what are the results with a slightly different search string:
"the movie where no babies can be born anymore"
http://www.bing.com/search?q=the+movie+where+no+babies+can+be+born+anymore&go=&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=the+movie+where+no+babies+can+be+born+anymor&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=
https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=the+movie+where+no+babies+can+be+born+anymore&pbx=1&oq=the+movie+where+no+babies+can+be+born+anymore&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=12&gs_upl=513l513l0l1474l1l1l0l0l0l0l98l98l1l1l0&gs_l=hp.12...513l513l0l1474l1l1l0l0l0l0l98l98l1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=88c33d31734d390&biw=1024&bih=683
Bing's search is more accurate in the above example
Not "knock it out of the park" accurate but GOOG returns the complete wrong answer
How many of these could you find if you had the time in your day?
That said, as a guy with a bunch of MSFT stock I can't remember the last time I used BING
After working a bit on a film in college, I started noticing cuts, and it started to drive me insane. It's one of those things that's largely inconsequential. I, as an audience member, am aware when a cut is made. But now, after doing a bit of editing, I notice just how many cuts there are. Conversely, I now have eternal admiration for scenes comprised of as few cuts as possible (cf. "Children of Men").
I think the biggest limitation of 3D, that is not shared by sound or color or other cinema technologies, is that it has limited ability for the director to stylistically alter the scene. It's limited to faithful and accurate reproductions, and that limits its ability to be used for artistic purposes.
Color can be used, and more importantly altered, to adjust the audience's perception, by giving characters and scenes psychologically/culturally-loaded color pallets. Smaller and more nimble cameras allow for all sorts of cinematographic shenanigans that subtly manipulate the audience's view by playing with the background while maintaining the foreground. Sound allows an actor another channel to convey emotion, and allowing spoken words instead of text allow for more interactive dialogue, which presents greater options for showing the relationships between characters. Sound also allows for narration, which allows the juxtaposition of exposition and demonstration.
The point of all of this, is that all of these technologies give the director additional tools with which to communicate, and using those tools, there are ways in which the cerebral stimulation or emotional impact of the film can be enhanced. Even the most gratuitous of CG effects can be used to good effect, even though 95% of CG is used for bigger and more impressive explosions. E.g., Children of Men makes excellent use of cinematography and CG enhancements, in order to add to the emotional impact of scenes and to add craptons of cultural allusions to the background.
By contrast, I don't see how 3D can be used to alter or enhance reality in a way that has meaning. It's largely limited to faithfully reproducing a real or realistic scene. You can make something appear closer or further than it otherwise would... I don't see the use case.
This is not to say that it can't be done. I'm not a film maker, and I'm obviously not aware of the full scope of what can be done. Maybe there is some crazy mind-bending case, and I'd love to see it. I love it when technologies are pushed beyond their boundaries to good effect. But I honestly don't think that there are ways to push the envelope of this technology. I think it's limited to realistic reproductions of reality. With that limitation, the film maker cannot use 3D to communicate something that he could not otherwise have communicated.
The only thing that additional mechanical accuracy adds is "immersion," which isn't really useful outside of escapist fiction. I, personally, am not very excited about the idea of more effective escapist fiction. Obviously, all new technical achievements in film lend themselves to bigger better escapist fiction, and often get invented for those use cases first. I have no problem with bigger better escapist fiction because I can just choose not to watch it. But, unlike other technical advancements in cinema, I don't think 3D has use outside of escapist fiction, which to me, makes it a rather lackluster achievement. It advances the craft of filmmaking without advancing the art.
[e]: I don't believe that 3D is entirely without potential. I'm outlining why I'm skeptical.
"... world of Children of Men, though." ah great movie. I almost cried on the scene where all the soldiers and the insurgents stop fighting to protect the baby.
If you ever heard the debate about what if all males went extinct or women could no longer reproduce (like the movie Children of Men), I believe that hermaphrodites are nature's proof of concept that "nature will always find a way".
Although I was never curious enough to research if it is believed that there is a possibility that hermaphrodite humans can impregnate themselves, like plants reproduce. Anyone know the speculative answer to this from a credible source?
If I recall correctly, the movie Children of Men had several scenes with animated newsstands in the background. I highly recommend seeing the film, if only for the background environment.
Here's a short of video of some of the advertisements and interfaces created for the film: http://www.foreignoffice.com/projekts/movies/movie_com.htm
http://www.blippr.com/movies/861-Children-of-Men - 59 reviews give pretty good summury of what to expect.