By Owen Tran, assistant editor
Monday, February 12, 2007

After scouring Yahoo! for the perfect Saturday nightmovie to watch with my cousins, I happened to come across the movie, Children of Men, which stars Clive Owen and Julianne Moore.

Yahoo presented an interesting premise for the movie... “a futuristic society faces extinction when no children are born and the human race has lost the ability to reproduce. England has descended into chaos, until an iron-handed warden is brought in to institute martial law. The warden's ability to keep order is threatened when a woman finds that she is pregnant with what would be the first child born in 27 years.”

And coupled with stellar reviews from renowned critics like Epert and Roeper made Children of Men seem like the movie to see over my weekend. But my choice turned out to be one of my worst mistakes, for Children of Men was anything but the typical movie choice of a high school teenager.

The plot of Children of Men takes place in a futuristic England, a world plunged in chaotic frenzy with streets ridden with both the homeless and dead. In this atmosphere of desperation and fruitless hopes, the human race is virtually sterile and pregnant women haven't been seen for a long time. Fear grips the land as anarchy and terrorism, prompting citizens to blame society's faults on immigrants, who are pressed into situations similar to those that the Jews experienced during the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, the relentless despair and the graphic depiction of war brutality proved to be too overwhelming for me; this movie is only for people with strong stomachs. Although the movie was disturbing, it failed to be an attention-grabber. Within the first hour, my cousins had already concluded that everything but the intermittent explosions was a snoozefest.

Regardless of the high acclamation the movie received, I found that the endless dullness, violence, and confusing storyline outweighed any positive aspects of Children of Men.