There are many movies about the future, especially the end times.
"2012", "Sun Havoc", "The Day After Tomorrow", "The Heart of the Earth" and so on...
Although the theme of the end times is an old terrier, it can never stop the infinite reverie of human beings for the future world.
However, if the film itself does not have any unique meaning, if you look back again after N years, you will find that some of the plots in it are set in honey juice, and the predicted future world deviates too much from reality...
However, there is a doomsday movie that can be said to be an alternative to the science fiction disaster genre -
Son of mankind
Children of Men
The setting in this movie is 2027, and the reason why it is different is because the film seems to have set the direction of humanity 15 years ago.
Adapted from the "First Lady of Speculative Fiction" P. D. James's mystery novel of the same name.
In the BBC's "100 Great Films of the 21st Century", "Son of Man" was ranked thirteenth.
The director of the film is the famous Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón.
You may not be familiar with the name Alfonso Cuarón, but you must have seen his harry potter and the prisoner of Azkaban, which was praised by fans as the most stylish part of the series.
Hollywood has always had the "Three Masters of Mexico": Gyro (Guillermo del Toro), Alfonso Caron and Gonzalez.
In 2007, the three of them simultaneously carried "Pan's Labyrinth", "Tower of Babel" and "Son of Man" to the 79th Academy Awards, receiving a total of 16 nominations, and finally won 4 small gold people.
For a time, Hollywood was conquered by the magical powers of Latin America.
In 2013, he won the 86th Academy Award for Best Director for the science fiction film Gravity.
For director Alfonso, the New York Times once commented:
He demonstrated how artistry could be combined with modern technology to take cinema to a whole new level.
The New York Times
"Son of Man" is one of Alfonso's three masterpieces.
IMDb rating, 7.9.
Rotten Tomatoes has a 92% freshness rating and is loved by 85% of the audience.
It's apocalyptic sci-fi.
There are many kinds of doomsday conjectures about human beings, and the inability to have children is probably the most desperate one.
London, UK, 2027.
The reason why humanity in 2027 is no longer proud of longevity, but young is precious, is that at this time, the entire human race has lost its fertility.
For 18 years, no new birth was born worldwide.
In the bars on the streets of London, the bad news came from the TV news that "Baby Diage", the youngest young man in the world (18 years and 4 months and 20 days), died in a boring physical confrontation.
People's eyes widened, unable to believe his passing. Who destroyed human reproduction?
Aliens, nuclear radiation, biochemical attacks, or environmental pollution... No one has yet understood why.
The only thing people know is that since 2009, women have begun to have mass miscarriages, three weeks of pregnancy, and the 6 months of pregnancy can not be saved.
Miscarriages spread like a plague, and after just 7 months there were no more records of pregnant women in the hospital.
The inability to pass on the generations has plunged humanity into unprecedented fear, and most of the negative human race, in the face of the imminent demise of mankind, has given up all hope.
They flout the law, loot, terrorism proliferates, and the world falls into anarchy.
Such a world, dirty.
Although science and technology have developed to the extent of playing Rubik's Cube on the air touch screen, human creativity has also been almost lost, and science and technology have been stagnant for many years.
Municipal garbage is piled casually on the side of the road, and the streets are run in disorderly and dusty by tricycles, motorcycles and cars. Such a world, chaos.
A second ago, the crowd saw the news of the death of "Baby Diego" in the coffee shop, and before they could mourn, there was a sudden explosion.
Most countries have experienced enormous political upheavals, resulting in large numbers of refugees. The backward African continent and radical Eastern European societies are on the brink of complete collapse.
Britain, on the other hand, was under a completely dark dictatorship, relying on a strong centralization to maintain a form of government, but adopting a conservative policy of expelling refugees from the outside world.
Euthanasia was ruthlessly performed, criminals in prisons were exiled, and immigrants from all over the world were largely reduced to semi-legal slaves...
This sparked a revolt by the immigrant community, forming the rebel armed army, the Fisher Party.
Such a world, despair.
What if I don't have children? People put their emotions on pets, and almost everyone has a dog.
Suicide rates and depression spread, and the government distributed suicide and anti-melancholy drugs as rations.
Trust between people collapsed, the government encouraged people to report each other, and publicity was broadcast everywhere that "it is illegal to know".
The army treats refugees like beasts, and the scene of random massacres is reminiscent of fascism.
In contrast, other kinds of animals are full of life and reproduction, and humans seem to be cursed.
The male protagonist, Faron, was once a radical advocate of peace, and slowly became a government official in this society.
His ex-wife, Julianne, was the leader of the rebel group Fisher Party.
She commissioned the man to obtain a legal identity card for a refugee girl in order to leave the UK safely.
Because this girl - is pregnant.
Ji's refugee status makes her disbelief with the British government, and Julian plans to send her to a mysterious "human project" organization to raise her children safely.
So the basic clue of this film is very clear: a "journey to escort the last child of mankind" in 2027.
While escorting the girl, the ex-wife was mistakenly killed by rioters.
In addition, there are the threat of dictatorship, the riots of terrorists, the repression of police fire...... Trouble ensued.
And when the black girl is in the middle of the war, the male protagonist must also give birth to her.
Under all circumstances, this is destined to be a difficult "son protection road"...
The whole film, before the birth of the child, is about despair: the human world that cannot reproduce, all the street scenes, the houses, the cries of the people, the betrayal of the organization, the eternal gray sky and the tones, all let people experience the suffocating despair.
After the birth of the child, after just 6 minutes of ceasefire, they entered a harsher environment, full of gun battles and corpses.
In pursuit of realism, Alfonso Cuarón uses a large number of long, one-shot shots, ranging in length from 4 to 6 minutes.
The advantage of the long shot is that it creates a sense of time that the audience is synchronized with the characters in the film, and the immersive experience is extraordinary.
I think that anyone who has seen the 6-and-a-half-minute long shot of the male protagonist rushing into the building in the flames of war (this shot is enough to be recorded in history) will be immediately impressed by the talent of the director.
Alfonso Cuarón didn't even mean "plot".
Most of the time, the camera follows the male protagonist Diou, but following along, the camera ignores Diou and turns to the "background" ignored by the protagonist.
Refugees trapped in barbed wire, serbian old ladies who pleaded urgently;
Fanatical religious elements, and mothers who are paralyzed on the side of the road crying.
In Alfonso Cuarón's other work, "Your Mother Too", this favor for "background" also appears.
The camera focuses on the heroine's slender and sexy calves, the voice is several protagonists in the car talking about their girlfriends, and the policemen with machine guns interrogating farmers outside the window are screened.
Alfonso Cuarón once said, "I don't like the kind of interpretive films that become the medium for lazy audiences... The film is held hostage by the narrative."
It is not that he does not explain, but that what he wants to narrate is hidden in the "background" of idle writing.
For example, when Diou goes to the home of a high-ranking official friend, there is a pig floating outside the floor-to-ceiling window, which is taken from the cover of Pink Floyd's "Animals" album and echoes George Orwell's "Animal Farm".
Alluding to the totalitarian politics of Britain at the time.
The streets are dirty and messy, and once a fence is past, it is a peaceful place, with well-dressed men and women walking their dogs on the grass to listen to music.
Such an inadvertent shot is enough to show the difference between the rich and the poor.
In the scene where the police arrest the refugees, there is a person wearing a black pointed hat, which is from the famous news image of the real-life US military's mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war.
(Stills from "Son of Man")
(Photo of U.S. military abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war)
As a science fiction film, "Son of Man" chooses the world 20 years later, shooting a future so close, in fact, it shows that the director's drunken intention is not "science fiction", but "reality".
In the film, britain refuses to allow refugees to enter the country, which is exactly what most countries in the world do today.
The cruel despair of 2027 is no different from that of 2007 and 2017.
Ji gave birth to a baby in the midst of the war, and both sides saw this new life with their own eyes.
Tagore has a poem in which every child is born with a message that God is not discouraged in man.
However, just after the short pause in the fire brought about by this new life, the war continued with a bang.
So you see no, the loss of reproductive capacity is not a reason to cause world unrest at all, and newborns can't stop humans from continuing to fight among themselves.
At this moment, science fiction is completely connected with reality.
In a way, how can this 2006 film not be a prediction of the present?
The film is set against the backdrop of a great crisis for the human species after events such as climate change, global pollution, nuclear radiation, social divisions and terrorist attacks.
In order to disperse the contradictions, the British government in the film blames the refugees for the problems that have arisen in the country, and vigorously suppresses them, resettling them like beasts and leaving them to fend for themselves.
Today, 10 years later, the many problems brought by the Syrian refugee tide to Europe have become a worldwide topic;
On the borders of European countries, refugees climb the barbed wire like in the movies; on this side of the Atlantic, Trump has been announcing the implementation of the Muslim registration act and the construction of a high wall on the US-Mexico border...
Some time ago, the container truck freezing case that shocked the world was broken, and all the victims were illegal vietnamese smugglers...
Everything that's happening is so similar to the setting in the movie...
Of course, the film's crisis setting for "human future sterilization" is inevitably a bit extreme, but how can the global epidemic that broke out at the beginning of this year not be a warning to mankind?
In 2006, we laughed and predicted the future.
In 2020, everyone wears a mask and can't see the whole picture.
Undoubtedly, Alfonso Cuarón is a director who cares about reality, and his perspective is meticulously arranged.
He once said that his film did not start until after the subtitles were finished.
Yes, the vitality of a good work blooms only after the audience walks out of the cinema.
Teach people to recognize the truth of the world.
Even at the end of the world, humanity will not stop killing.
Even if only one person is left, the greed of human nature will not be reduced by half a point.
The newborn in the film is the hope of the future.
What about now?