Never Let Me Go [A Mark Romanek Film]

[Ghostboy]

The book is more opaque about certain things in that way that books can be - for example, it never suggests the alternate history the way this does at the beginning - but for the most part it's a dead-on adaptation. And it upset me and made me really sad in a quiet, subtle way without ever truly destroying me. I think it had the potential to destroy me, but that it stopped short - which isn't really a bad thing. I have a feeling that it's going to stick with me.

[matt35mm]

I liked this movie.  I was more affected by the front half, and much of the middle.  THAT LITTLE GIRL LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE CAREY MULLIGAN IT'S FREAKY.  And she was heartbreaking.  As the movie goes into their later adulthood, I felt like the movie became a bit rushed, and perhaps less inspired.  It kind of felt like route execution, and the movie lost a lot of steam for me.  It also got a bit maudlin toward the end.  I have the feeling that this whole last part works much better in the book, and it's one of those things where you really need to get more of a sense of time passing and time lost than you can pack into a 2 hour movie.  So the impact of, say, seeing an old friend again after 10 years, isn't very strong because the audience just saw them 10 minutes ago.

But yes, the front half and the beginnings of the love story and the pining and the tragedy of their purpose was all very lovely and moving.  Oh, and the solid muted colors as title cards?  Beautiful!

[Stefen]

I didn't like this at all. I thought it was a mess. Started out really great, but as they became adults, it lost a lot of what it had going for it. I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing really ever did. It kept everything so vague, which I usually enjoy, but here it was just frustrating. I wish it would have touched more on the world around them because I found that far more interesting than the silly love triangle the story focused on. Did anyone else think Keira Knightley looked like Vampire Hunter D in this?

Spoilers, I guess.
Why didn't the kids just split? I mean, if I you're being used and know it, why not split? It never gave any indication that they could be tracked down. They seemed to just obey. And why were these women so infatuated with Tommy? The kid was a dope. There was nothing about him at all that made you feel like they could fall in love with him. He was just a dumb awkward kid and turned into a dumb awkward adult. I was really disappointed in Andrew Garfield's performance in this. He didn't seem like the next big thing to me.

I was really looking forward to this one and decided to see it this weekend instead of Social Network because I figured Social Network will be around in the theaters for awhile, but I wish I hadn't.

[pete]

hmm knightly's got a knack for picking up scripts that only look oscar in trailers.

[Champion Souza]

Why didn't the kids just split?

In the Creative Screenwriting podcast Kazuo Ishiguro and Alex Garland talk about this.  People accept their fate.  In the podcast they made the obvious comparison to concentration camp inmates.  Which does ring true.  The movie could do a better job of selling it.

[Pubrick]

guess i'll have to read the book first in case this ruins it.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

I'll probably be seeing this again soon, but I can at least say this movie is absolute eye candy.  Narratively it didn't bother me, maybe I'd have to read the book, but it didn't seem like something too special considering it was THE BEST NOVEL OF THE DECADE.  Not even to say it was a bad story, per se, but most of the time I was just glued to the composition of each scene.

[Gamblour.]

This movie is beautiful with a handful of problems. Carey Mulligan took my heart in An Education, but now she's fucking taken my soul. Her performance is so powerful, and she hardly says a word in the entire film. Andrew Garfield is good at being dumb, wide-eyed innocent, so I see why he'll make a good Peter Parker. It'll be very different.

Mark Romanek's imagery is, again, beautiful, and he is great at texturing the world with poetic icons (the bird on the tea kettle, the paper trash on the barbed wire). I think he just needs a stronger screenplay and more time working with actors. My wife has read the book and told me several things they changed, which seems crazy that they would ever change them because they would have been great moments in the film. It seems like they flattened the overall emotional level of the film, which sort of worked for me, but maybe that's what prevented it from being great. It's too subdued, too passive.

[polkablues]

The book is extraordinarily subdued and passive as well, though (a book I actually did read, yay!). As I got to the end, I was increasingly unsure of how it would work as a film, just because it's so anti-climactic; it creates the impression that it's building up to something, but takes the unusual tactic of deflating those expectations rather than accommodating them. It works in book form, but our minds are so trained to a certain form of storytelling in cinema that what comes across as nuanced and clever in prose could feel on the screen like a sneeze that never comes.

I am still looking forward to the movie, though. One thing that may throw me off: I went through the whole book picturing Keira Knightley as Kathy and Carey Mulligan as Ruth, and now I've looked at imdb and found it's the other way around. I think I like my way better.

[SiliasRuby]

*Maybe Spoilers*

I didn't know much going in and boy am I glad that I did that. I'm just now re-reading every post now.

A sad portrait of dying youth scraping at every moment to get at or experience more of life. However tragic or futile it is they want to grab at more. This really touched my heart like no other film with british actors ever had. So much elegant beauty and quiet dignity is infused into the hour and forty three minutes that I started weeping by the end. Guess its the only sci-fi film to do this to me. Although, I wouldn't call this a sci-fi film by any conventional stretch of the imagination. In fact I really don't categorize it as such.

I can look over the problems with this film like most sci-fi films or most films in general if it hits me like an emotional ton of bricks or I get something out of it visually I'll purchase the film. By golly, I'm buying this on blu-ray the next time I pick up some films (in bulk of course).

[polkablues]

It's rare that I wish for a movie to be longer, but it really would have benefited from an extra 20-30 minutes, building up the characters more while they're still at Hailsham.  Maybe it's just from having read the book first, but it felt like so much of the later developments between the characters is given short shrift by our only getting glimpses of how their relationships developed earlier in the film.  It's a beautiful film, and even with my reservations I was fully moved by it, but I never felt we got a sense of the ups and downs of the friendship between Ruth and Kathy, or really any sense of connection between Kathy and Tommy prior to the last act.  

Carey Mulligan really is a wonder, though; I can't get enough of that girl.