I was just getting used to the name Frohley

Children of Men
M'House
DVD
12/4/07

Since this title keeps getting thrown about whenever I seem to talk about The Mist I figured that I'd watch it again. So I did last night after Tilda went to bed and before Jamee got home from teaching. It's the first time I'd watched it all the way through since we saw it the theater the first weekend of the wide release.

It's still one of my favorite movies. It's got this uncompromising feel to it that reminds me of Kubrick, especially the Hue sequences in Full Metal Jacket. There's a particular image when they're driving to Bexhill towards the end of the film where you can see huge clouds of black smoke in the distance that looks like it could be a right out of Jacket, though I'm sure that here they're CG. In Full Metal Jacket, as pointed out in the commentary, Kubrick had some guys two miles in the distance timing the smoke just right. For every take.

Heck, look at the US poster. It even looks like a Kubrick one-sheet in black instead of white (or yellow. or purple) - Lots of negative space and a strong central image. But I digress.

Anyway, since reading about the opening shots project that I mentioned in the Mist post, I've been trying to see If I can read anything into the opening shots of what I've been watching. Here it's more of the opening sequence than a single shot. We don't even begin with an image. We begin with sound. A series of radio broadcasts that tell us that we're in the future and things have gotten bad, but we don't know why. Then we're in a coffee shop. There is a news broadcast. The youngest person on the planet has just died. He was 18. So we establish that there hasn't been a human birth in nearly twenty years. Probably why everything's falling apart. But we're in this coffee shop. And it's packed. It establishes the world. There are less and less people in it every day and the one's who are left try to come together. There's a woman holding a cat (or is it a dog?) It's the first instance of a recurring motif throughout the film. There are no more children, so people use animals as a surrogate.

Then Theo comes in. Not our hero. The film doesn't have one. Our protagonist. He comes in, wades through the group, buys his coffee and leaves. He's not part of the group. An outsider.

Moments later the coffee shop explodes. Theo flinches (heroes don't flinch). A woman stumbles out of the could of dust pouring out of the coffee shop. For an instant we see that she's holding her severed arm.

Then there's a hard cut to the title.

So we start out the movie with death and violence. The specific death of the youngest person on the planet and the general impending death of the human race. Death and violence is random and Theo escapes more through chance than by anything he specifically does. This is set up in a couple of minutes and looms over the rest of the film. Which is is interesting to me because we have a movie here that sets up a feeling of impending, inevitable, random death ends with impending, random life.

There are at least two sequences of birth imagery towards the conclusion, after the actual birth of the new youngest person on the planet. The first begins the celebrated tracking shot through the combat zone in the refugee camp (actually several shots blended together on a computer, but who cares, it's great). It's a moving shot down a tunnel into a scene of incredible carnage and death. The second occurs as Theo and Kee and the baby escape on the boat, traveling down a tunnel out to the sea. There may be others, but I missed them this time around. I don't think there are any before the baby is born and if that's the case the multiple uses of birth imagery after that occurrence could be Cuaron's way of telling the audience cinematically that it was not an isolated incident. It's begun and will keep happening. Or it could be a symbol of Theo's rebirth. Could be both. Could be neither. Cuaron doesn't spoonfeed the viewer. And I like that.

Can't wait to see what I notice next time.