Justin's Log

Children of Men (2006) • Universal Pictures • Used for review and commentary purposes A frightening vision of the future where humanity is losing its future, while fear and social division are taking its place. What happens to a society when people slowly stop believing there will be a tomorrow? Some science-fiction movies try to impress us by showing how different the future could be. Children of Men (2006) takes almost the opposite approach. Its future is frightening because so much of it feels familiar. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the film takes place in 2027, in a world where humanity has mysteriously lost the ability to have children. Society has not completely disappeared, but h...

Snowpiercer (2013) movie poster. Source: CJ Entertainment / RADiUS-TWC. Used for review and commentary purposes. Snowpiercer (2013), directed by Bong Joon-ho, is a science-fiction thriller built around an unusually simple visual idea: the remaining human population lives on a train, and a person's place in society can almost literally be measured by how far forward they are allowed to go. What makes the movie memorable to me is how efficiently Bong turns that physical layout into storytelling. The characters do not simply talk about inequality. They walk through it. Every new carriage reveals another part of the society that has been hidden from the people living behind it. That makes the journey through the train feel like more than an action-movie objective. The farther Curtis and the other passengers move forward, the more both they and the audience discover about how this strange ...