Children of Men vs. Pan’s Labyrinth

[ChromePony]

EDIT: Not sure if this is a spoiler cause its kinda the whole premise of the movie, and I don't what you're doing in this thread if you want to avoid spoilers, but consider yourself warned.

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I haven't seen Pan's, but I felt that Children of Men let me down a little bit. It was very well shot and put together but I kept waiting for some satifactory explanation of what happened and it just never came. This basically reduced the plot into a basic action movie, "We must accomplish this task while other people are trying to kill us", even though it was produced more artistically than say Die Hard or whatever I wanted more from the plot. I think the background story had a lot of potential so I guess I was just hoping for more and while I enjoyed it enough, it just didn't really deliver on the level I wanted it to.

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My roommate had read the book a while ago and liked it as a science-fiction book. Consequently, he was disappointed with the movie, because it's pretty weak in that department. Die Hard is actually I think a very valid comparison, in a lot of ways; COM is just a really effective action movie, with a sweet premise and some political commentary (Homeland Security/visual references to Abu Ghraib/etc.) thrown in. The ambush scene in particular got me on edge more than I can remember a movie doing in quite some time.

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Anyone know if the book does a better job explaining the situation in CoM?

I just don't find the whole, no more children -> total chaos to be an obvious result. Yeah it would be tramatic, but from a purely economic perspective there are less dependents to take care of so it seems like there should be more resources for everyone else. Instead it seems that society gets broken down into a sort of class system with martial law imposed and lots of foreigners are kicked out of the UK and left starving the in streets/forests.

It would also be nice to have a little more confidence in these magical people and fancy ship that they are trying to get to but we really learn nothing about them.

[gumpzilla]

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I just don't find the whole, no more children -> total chaos to be an obvious result. Yeah it would be tramatic, but from a purely economic perspective there are less dependents to take care of so it seems like there should be more resources for everyone else. Instead it seems that society gets broken down into a sort of class system with martial law imposed and lots of foreigners kicked out of the UK and are left starving the in streets/forests.

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That's different; it's really only obliquely mentioned a couple of times, but the implication is that terrorist attacks have shredded pretty much every other major urban center, and that Britain is pretty much the last country left standing. Thus all the refugees, which is where the martial law is coming from.

There are less dependents, but as your workforce wanes your production also goes down, etc. Apparently (secondhand here) the book does a better job looking at all of the consequences of this, and also adds the wrinkle that it was all the dudes who went infertile. This makes a bunch more sense, because if you found one fertile guy he could really get to work on the repopulation front. Kee, not so much. But for visual reasons (and hell, perhaps even because this hopelessness was something the director was shooting for) I can see why they made the switch.

[ChromePony]

I all for suspension of disbelief in these kinds of movies, I am an avid 24 fan afterall, but even just a little more background on what you explained here would have helped set the scene a little bit better. It probably would have been too hard to go into that kind of depth in 2 hours, which I guess is why we read books afterall. Again I didn't dislike the movie, I just felt it was capable of more and that feeling always disappoints me.

[ianlippert]

Just saw Pan's Labryinth tonight and I have to agree with OP, although I disagree that the let down had anything to do with hype. I never really saw any trailers for this movie but I had a general idea that it would be a kids fairy tale. k, thx I'll pass. Except everywhere I was reading about it, the movie was getting rave reviews. My family went to see it tonight and so I decided to tag a long.

So expecting some sort of variation on Labryinth I was extremly disappointed when I found out that the fantasy part was actually only in a small portion of the movie. I was left with a pretty shallow 'facist vs rebels' movie populated by a bunch of 2 dimensional characters. Take out the fantasy bits and you have an extremly predictable and boring movie. I really have no idea why this movie is getting so much hype. Its not terrible, but its nowhere near the 90% its getting on rottentomoatoes.

Children of Men on the other hand was amazing.

[bluef0x]

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neuro and others,

I try to limit my knowledge of movies before seeing them to the Rotten Tomatoes score and a few headlines of reviews. Oftentimes, I've seen some trailers for movies, but I try to put those out of my mind as much as possible.

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Same... I despise trailers. Too many of them actually give away the whole story. <3 Rottentomatoes.com. The only time they mess up is when it's a complete horror or action movie. They always get a terrible score, despite being great for the genre. Sometimes anything not being shown nationwide is also inflated... but a few reviews and I can tell if I would like the movie or not.

[Nez477]

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Just saw Pan's Labryinth tonight and I have to agree with OP, although I disagree that the let down had anything to do with hype. I never really saw any trailers for this movie but I had a general idea that it would be a kids fairy tale. k, thx I'll pass. Except everywhere I was reading about it, the movie was getting rave reviews. My family went to see it tonight and so I decided to tag a long.

So expecting some sort of variation on Labryinth I was extremly disappointed when I found out that the fantasy part was actually only in a small portion of the movie. I was left with a pretty shallow 'facist vs rebels' movie populated by a bunch of 2 dimensional characters. Take out the fantasy bits and you have an extremly predictable and boring movie. I really have no idea why this movie is getting so much hype. Its not terrible, but its nowhere near the 90% its getting on rottentomoatoes.

Children of Men on the other hand was amazing.

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I concur 100%.

The girl put together a fine performance, as did the lead 'fascist' or whatever. But overall I just couldn't get into the story or really see why it got all the hype it did.

[orange]

I've seen both. I really wish that there had been more scenes in the fantasy world for Pan's lab. Overall a decent movie, but I wish that they had focused a bit more on that stuff.

Children of Men was a decent flick too, but I thought it was a bit slow at times. I wish the ending wouldve been a bit more conclusive, but whatever.

Overall, both movies were a bit disappointing, but I was geared for something huge I think, and set my expectations too high.