The dystopia the world posits is all the more convincing because it merely tweaks the current circumstance. As in V for Vendetta, Britain is the only civilization left standing, although it's not very civilized. Immigrants are rounded up and left to wait in cages on the street or brutal refugee camps for deportation. Television ads remind citizens that it's illegal to buy from or sell to them. Sound familiar? And the inability to walk down the street without knowing if you'll be blown up or kidnapped isn't science fiction at all in, oh, say, 23 countries already.
Cuarón makes you feel the paranoia of living in a world where nothing is stable while the production design sets the grime-meter to eleven. All the world's racism, fear, and anger of the last few years is somehow pooled here and thrown back at us, often in unbelievably long and masterful tracking shots. It's almost like someone challenged Cuarón to tell the story in as few edits as possible.
It's not surprising that human life is held cheaply when it's in abundance. What this movie shows us is that it can be even cheaper when there's no more where it came from. And when there's a chance that all of that will change, it's suddenly precious again. That may sound cheesy on paper, but Cuarón makes it achingly real.
It may seem from this list that escapism is dead to me, but with sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man, Shrek, The Bourne Identity, Ocean's 11, 28 Days Later, The Fantastic Four, Die Hard and Bruce Almighty due this year, I don't think it's going anywhere.
Article comments
1 - Lisa McKay
Congratulations! This article has been chosen as a BC Magazine editor's pick this week.