When it was released, Children of Men seemed a fanciful dystopia. Today with its depictions of environmental blight, terrorist bombs, refugee-phobia, and a militarized police state, it seems uncomfortably prescient. The film is sci-fi, but it doesn't lean heavily on the use of interfaces for its storytelling. So while it will be only a handful of reviews, let's celebrate the 10th anniversary of this dark film with some nerdy analysis.
In the year 2010, humanity suddenly suffers from global infertility. Most of the world is thrown into chaos, but Britian soliders on under military rule. Refugees in this society are considered a threat to the nation, and they are routinely rounded up and deported or killed.
In 2027, one member of this society, named Theo Faron, is dutifully trudging on with his life when he is kidnapped and taken to meet his estranged wife Julian, now the leader of a secretive and militaristic refugee-rights organization. She convinces him to use his relationship to his powerful cousin Nigel to arrange transportation papers for a young woman. When Theo delivers the papers, he learns that the young woman, named Kee, is pregnant. Shocked at this symbol of hope, he protects her from a society that hates her, a government that will kill her, and the refugee-rights organization who wants to use the child for their own ends, escorting her at great personal cost to a fabled boat that can protect and nurture her and her child and thereby the future of humanity.
Posted in Children of Men (2007).
At this point there is still an hour of film and a dozen interfaces to go. Fortunately, by abandoning a strict chronological approach these can be grouped into four types of interfaces.
The LoTeks and Yakuza both use a kind of high tech binoculars.
Johnny enters cyberspace to try and find the download access codes for the data, an attempt that fails.
Retrieving the data without the codes needs two brain reading medical scanners and a final LoTek brain hacking device.
In between action scenes Johnny and others make video phone calls using a variety of different gadgets.
The last of these phone calls itself demonstrates two interesting interfaces, a puppet avatar and a cringing computer.
In this remaining hour Johnny is always accompanied by Jane, the other lead character. She won't appear in any of these discussions though, because she never uses any interfaces. Jane is a bodyguard, who relies on simple but reliable blades and throwing spikes for weapons. She has an augmented nervous system, with sockets in her arms that we briefly see connected to some electronic medical equipment, but alas we never learn the full extent of her capabilities. I suggest reading Neuromancer if you're interested in cyberpunk body modifications, as Jane is just a renaming of Molly who appeared in the original Johnny Mnemonic short story and Neuromancer.
Posted in Johnny Mnemonic (1995).