In a movie where the main formal tic is (always extraordinarily striking) “long pans across massed, anonymous suffering,” it feels a bit hypocritical to tell The Most Important Story Possible In This World, much less to give it a happy ending. There was no happy ending for those people who you spent so much effort to render the miserable lives of - why bother when they don’t actually matter? All this to say, it’s a shame a world with such brilliantly crafted edges (and a great Clive Owen performance) exists with a single-minded interest on what those edges contain, is only there to prop up a self-centered, didactic and overly expository (I’ve heard this called a masterclass in showing, not telling, and while it’s true there’s a great deal more showing than there might be in other movies, that doesn’t mean it’s light on the telling!) script about The People Who, No Joke, Might Actually Save The World. Good for them. Not everyone gets to live out their main character syndrome! There’s a take I see sometimes that movies are unfairly cruel to their characters. I’ve never really understood it - this is fiction, nobody is suffering for real. Children of Men, though, recreates imagery of very real suffering (overcrowded refugee camps, people held in cages, tortured prisoners at Abu Grahib, low-level domestic terrorism) with horrifying and effective verisimilitude as the background to the story of an invented “way out.” “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” Why tell this one? What boring priorities! Hand to God, I think I Am Autism (unfairly repeatedly scrubbed from this website’s database despite Ridley Scott’s Hennessy commercial clinging on for years) is Cuarón’s better dystopian birth defect movie lol, playing out like a piece of propaganda you might see in the world portrayed here. In Children of Men, the day might be saved, a beacon of hope gets lit for a world who treats it with messianic significance. In I Am Autism, the audience is encouraged to straight up do voodoo eugenics, that’s how screwed Cuarón (and Autism Speaks) seem to think humanity is. And people call this bleak? This is saccharine candyland shit, who wants that from dystopian fiction? What a singularly baffling miscalculation.