I went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.
This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.
> "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts."
One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring. I don't think that people realize that they're doing this choice, but there must have been enormous evolutionary pressure for this to evolve, and a lot of data shows exactly that.
> One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring.
I don't think that's true. There's a lot of crisis and uncertainty today, but fertility is still going down. Many people are investing their resources in zero offspring.
When we earn more, the time spent to care for a baby 'costs' more because it's time not spent working. It's time not spent continuing your education. It's time not spent doing some expensive bougie luxury like paying someone else to cook you a meal.
It's a similar reasoning as to why working hours have only dropped a bit. When we earn more per hour, we can afford the same quality of life with fewer hours worked. However it also means each hour we choose not work is costing us more in opportunity cost. So we choose to work more.
Still, considering how many years we spend in education with little to no employment, and how many years we are currently able to live after we have retired, the % of our lifetime spent working has never been lower.
They only require lots of time if you want to be a good parent. We should be celebrating the fact that there are fewer latchkey kids and more involved mothers and especially fathers today.
I also just feel like the basic calculus of this aspect for parents has changed as economies move up the value chain — I have relatives and childhood friends who grew up on farms, and they regularly helped out during busy times from a relatively young age (even if today they do all the schooling they are supposed to and don't go work full-time early one); meanwhile many people today will be in education with limited earnings until well into their twenties
This depends heavily on what time frame you're talking about.
For much of history people would often have children to work on farms and support the parents when they're older. Sometimes this support system was nuclear. Sometimes it was broader in society. So how do you account for "expensive" here? I honestly don't know.
But a lot of people focus on more modern times, particularly post-WW2, because the trend here is pretty much straight up. Education, housing and medical expenses have far exceeded inflation and real wages.
In more developed Asian countries (eg South Korea, Japan, China) the number of children has gone down in part because it is so expensive. In South Korea, so much is spent on tutoring to get into a good university to get a good job. The entire family's income is devoted to that. In China, for a man to be marriageable he often needs to pay the bride's family, have property, have a good job and so on. China has actually tried tackling some of this by popping the real estate bubble and outlawing private tutoring. Still, competition is intense and the bride price is still very real.
I think about the Fermi Paradox. What if the answer to why there are no galactic civilizations is as simple as "because capitalism"? Birth rates in developed countries are generally falling off a cliff as the barrier-to-entry gets increasingly higher.
One of the best movies I've ever watched, and one of the few that I could only watch once. It alternates between a gut-wrenching view of a very plausible future and scenes that have you sitting on the edge of your chair. To call it roller coaster would be an understatement.
If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.
Not that it matters but it feels closer to historical fiction than science fiction. Yes, this history happens to be in the future rather than the past, but in either case there is a lot of speculation about a culture or context removed from the present day. I suppose the difference is that there's an implied message of, "this can still happen if we let it" vs assuming that humanity is currently too enlightened to ever fall back into whatever old way of being. It feels like a failing of how we teach history that kids come away from youth thinking things like, "well nazis were bad but that was the olden days, now we all know better."
It appears as one take, although I think it's actually several different scenes with a seamless transition.
To me it's one of the best scenes if not the best scene I've ever seen in a movie: from a small intense escape scene to a full battle, followed by a revelation that brings people to their knees. All shot basically first-person, with extremely complex action and emotion. Absolutely gutting.
It's a real gem. I've only seen it once, but I still reference this movie at least a couple of times a year. With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline, it only becomes more relevant.
> With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline
As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive (i.e. >2.0 children per woman), and birthrates are only really low in very affluent demographics.
There's nothing particularly sinister going on either - since most children with access to adequate nutrition and healthcare now survive into adulthood, these societies are not losing a ton of population to wars, very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.
Yeah, it is very weird to me too. It's only a problem in a handful of countries that have really, really low birthrates and can't/won't attract immigrants.
In 2024, 171 countries had birth rates below replacement rates. That's gotten worse since then. 70% of people live in countries with birth rates below replacement rates.
It’s a handful of countries that have 1) “really, really low birthrates,” i.e., not just below replacement but very below replacement AND 2) do not have relatively permissive immigration policies.
That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.
India has been struggling to get its population growth control under control for decades. I think we can excuse a brief overcorrection as they stabilise.
I love Children of Men, I think its dark, prescient, moving and a fantastic technical achievement. Easily one of my top five movies.
I found myself nodding along with everything until I hit these lines:
> Many excellent movies are chase movies! The Terminator (1984) is a chase movie. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is a chase movie. One of the greatest movies ever made (according to me), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is the purest distillation of a chase movie.
Why do people love Fury Road so much? I watched it in the cinema, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was very colorful, had great stunts, etc. A bit derivative of the second and third movie but whatever. George Miller has a format that seems to work. I was shocked when it was nominated for best picture. Best Picture! Years later I listened to a podcast on the making of it, and got a lot of insight into the struggle behind the scenes, and how difficult it was both on set and in pre-production. I had new found respect for everyone involved. I watched it again with new eyes, and... nope. It's fine. It's got some great set-pieces, but I just don't understand the hyperbole. It is, at best, the 3rd best Mad Max movie
I remember seeing Fury Road in theatres with tempered expectations. It was a phenomenal experience. We were very surprised at how good of a movie it was.
Mad Max is big shoes to fill, and Fury Road managed it in a way that was so fresh I barely thought about the previous films. It truly stands alone and that's no easy feat. I do not find it derivative at all. If anything it pulled the franchise in a new direction.
Everything is just awesome. They made an awesome movie. The cars are awesome. The characters are awesome. The sounds and practical effects are awesome. The pace is awesome. It's just great stuff.
It surpasses mediocrity across all metrics. That's why it's more than "fine".
Children of Men was released very early here in Australia. There was very little prior buzz for the movie, almost no advertising at all. Hype was minimal, there was a little bit of buzz from the Venice International Film Festival but it was barely advertised and I had only vaguely known about it in passing based on reading some film discussion forum posts at the time, the concept sounding interesting to me. No one in that discussion had actually seen it.
I didn't even go to the movies to see it specifically, I went for The Departed, but I saw that Children of Men was showing and figured, what the heck.
Imagine going into that movie with zero expectations. I felt shellshocked afterwards. I go online, no one is talking about it. I watched what I still consider one of the greatest movies ever made and over the next few months it's like it doesn't exist.
I did eventually see The Departed, it's pretty great. I think I made the right choice though.
I'm just at beginning of the article, but I immediately have to disagree with something :)
"...this remains one of the absolute best sci fi movies of the 21st century."
I'd say it's not just one of the best sci fi movies, it's one of the best movies of the 21st century, period. Definitely one of my all time favorites, despite some of its flaws, it wastes no time, has great pace, is a fully contained story and gets its point across very well. And I'm not even talking about how relevant some of its themes are.
Interesting how the article is not mentioning the (inverted) Christian allegory as if that doesn't even exist. It's not even subtle if you actually watch the film, like that's almost the point of it.
The original book is even more explicit about that, like Theo does a makeshipt baptism on the infant amidst all the fighting.
I was going to say the same thing, there is so much Christian symbolism in the film that to not mention it at all makes me think the author is just not aware of the things the film is referencing.
The parallels between that film and the UK as it currently is are harrowing.
I always joked I was going live in a house like Michael Kanes character, only to end up doing it.
A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.
The way the film depicts the treatment of immigrants was what always got me, I would joke (half) just wait till climate change makes southern Europe too hot to live in…
Sci-fi has always been the perfect vehicle for social commentary, because it does not instantly trigger anything inside people. It is an impossible story in an impossible world, so relax. If you want to write something about black and white people, you should write a story about purple and green people instead. That's how X-men escapes all the woke allegations.
> One particularly brilliant aspect I keep thinking about is how the movie ends. We don’t know what will become of Kee and her baby. [...] We want to think Kee and her baby will change things, but we don’t know for sure because the future is—quite literally, in the final scene—shrouded in fog.
When I first saw this movie, I think the last scene was just her with baby and dead protagonist in a boat, in the fog.
But when I rewatched it more recently, there was also the ship they were trying to reach appearing out of the fog.
Did this movie have two different ending versions? Or did I just misremeber or watched a damaged copy? What ending have you seen?
IMO it would be perfect to turn into a series, they could update it with references to the billionaire class, drones, AI, asymmetric warfare, immigration, pandemics, celebrity and the attention addiction economy!
Apple if you don’t mess up Neuromancer, please make this next!
Off top of my head, Silo has many of those things, eventually, the attention economy gets skewered a bit in Upload which is not from TVplus. Combat is so expensive for good live action maybe the best one can hope for is the depiction in something like Pantheon.
Please, no. Stories like these work because they are timeless. One of the reasons that TV nowadays is so boring is because every show runner wants to use it as a platform for their own social commentary.
I went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.
This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.
YouTube short of the space: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gww1RtyEwww
I keep marveling at art's capacity to elicit deep thoughts and feelings, universally
Especially installation and concept art- as its obviously hard to package and sell for the parasitic art market.
> "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts."
One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring. I don't think that people realize that they're doing this choice, but there must have been enormous evolutionary pressure for this to evolve, and a lot of data shows exactly that.
> One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring.
I don't think that's true. There's a lot of crisis and uncertainty today, but fertility is still going down. Many people are investing their resources in zero offspring.
Babies have always been expensive. The expense just happened to not be fully accounted for until recently.
Although, perhaps it could be better framed as the short term expense was not accounted for, whereas now, the long term expense is not accounted for.
Short term being less than a few decades and long term being more than a few decades.
There is also a collective vs individual expense aspect.
> Babies have always been expensive.
They have always been expensive, and they have never been as expensive as today.
More than any other resource, babies require time. Talking purely from a US perspective, inflation adjusted income has never been higher.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n
When we earn more, the time spent to care for a baby 'costs' more because it's time not spent working. It's time not spent continuing your education. It's time not spent doing some expensive bougie luxury like paying someone else to cook you a meal.
It's a similar reasoning as to why working hours have only dropped a bit. When we earn more per hour, we can afford the same quality of life with fewer hours worked. However it also means each hour we choose not work is costing us more in opportunity cost. So we choose to work more.
Still, considering how many years we spend in education with little to no employment, and how many years we are currently able to live after we have retired, the % of our lifetime spent working has never been lower.
They only require lots of time if you want to be a good parent. We should be celebrating the fact that there are fewer latchkey kids and more involved mothers and especially fathers today.
I also just feel like the basic calculus of this aspect for parents has changed as economies move up the value chain — I have relatives and childhood friends who grew up on farms, and they regularly helped out during busy times from a relatively young age (even if today they do all the schooling they are supposed to and don't go work full-time early one); meanwhile many people today will be in education with limited earnings until well into their twenties
This depends heavily on what time frame you're talking about.
For much of history people would often have children to work on farms and support the parents when they're older. Sometimes this support system was nuclear. Sometimes it was broader in society. So how do you account for "expensive" here? I honestly don't know.
But a lot of people focus on more modern times, particularly post-WW2, because the trend here is pretty much straight up. Education, housing and medical expenses have far exceeded inflation and real wages.
In more developed Asian countries (eg South Korea, Japan, China) the number of children has gone down in part because it is so expensive. In South Korea, so much is spent on tutoring to get into a good university to get a good job. The entire family's income is devoted to that. In China, for a man to be marriageable he often needs to pay the bride's family, have property, have a good job and so on. China has actually tried tackling some of this by popping the real estate bubble and outlawing private tutoring. Still, competition is intense and the bride price is still very real.
I think about the Fermi Paradox. What if the answer to why there are no galactic civilizations is as simple as "because capitalism"? Birth rates in developed countries are generally falling off a cliff as the barrier-to-entry gets increasingly higher.
One of the best movies I've ever watched, and one of the few that I could only watch once. It alternates between a gut-wrenching view of a very plausible future and scenes that have you sitting on the edge of your chair. To call it roller coaster would be an understatement.
If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.
Not that it matters but it feels closer to historical fiction than science fiction. Yes, this history happens to be in the future rather than the past, but in either case there is a lot of speculation about a culture or context removed from the present day. I suppose the difference is that there's an implied message of, "this can still happen if we let it" vs assuming that humanity is currently too enlightened to ever fall back into whatever old way of being. It feels like a failing of how we teach history that kids come away from youth thinking things like, "well nazis were bad but that was the olden days, now we all know better."
This is a great movie. There's more tension in the low-speed car chase scene than any high-speed chase I've ever watched.
There is also imho one of the best one-shot scenes ever made
https://youtu.be/g2vX7IHg_SE
Sits on the throne with the one in True Detective S01E04
https://youtu.be/vnRTITzYnXs
It appears as one take, although I think it's actually several different scenes with a seamless transition.
To me it's one of the best scenes if not the best scene I've ever seen in a movie: from a small intense escape scene to a full battle, followed by a revelation that brings people to their knees. All shot basically first-person, with extremely complex action and emotion. Absolutely gutting.
The car chase scene mentioned above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOyAXPn1V9k
Also an incredible long shot. Adolescence did amazing work with the technique recently, too.
The single shot action sequence in the immigrant camp is my fav scene.
It's a real gem. I've only seen it once, but I still reference this movie at least a couple of times a year. With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline, it only becomes more relevant.
> With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline
As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive (i.e. >2.0 children per woman), and birthrates are only really low in very affluent demographics.
There's nothing particularly sinister going on either - since most children with access to adequate nutrition and healthcare now survive into adulthood, these societies are not losing a ton of population to wars, very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.
Yeah, it is very weird to me too. It's only a problem in a handful of countries that have really, really low birthrates and can't/won't attract immigrants.
In 2024, 171 countries had birth rates below replacement rates. That's gotten worse since then. 70% of people live in countries with birth rates below replacement rates.
So not just a handful of countries.
It’s a handful of countries that have 1) “really, really low birthrates,” i.e., not just below replacement but very below replacement AND 2) do not have relatively permissive immigration policies.
That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.
What is worrisome it's not the instant figures. It's the trend.
> very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.
But reproduction is below replacement rate.
And? It's only a few years since folks were deeply worried about overpopulation, and whether the earth could support 10 billion people...
Are Ireland and India considered affluent now?
> Is Ireland considered affluent now?
Ireland is the richest country in Europe by GDP-per-capita[1] (apart a few uber-rich city states).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
> India...
India has been struggling to get its population growth control under control for decades. I think we can excuse a brief overcorrection as they stabilise.
Tangent time:
I love Children of Men, I think its dark, prescient, moving and a fantastic technical achievement. Easily one of my top five movies.
I found myself nodding along with everything until I hit these lines:
> Many excellent movies are chase movies! The Terminator (1984) is a chase movie. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is a chase movie. One of the greatest movies ever made (according to me), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is the purest distillation of a chase movie.
Why do people love Fury Road so much? I watched it in the cinema, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was very colorful, had great stunts, etc. A bit derivative of the second and third movie but whatever. George Miller has a format that seems to work. I was shocked when it was nominated for best picture. Best Picture! Years later I listened to a podcast on the making of it, and got a lot of insight into the struggle behind the scenes, and how difficult it was both on set and in pre-production. I had new found respect for everyone involved. I watched it again with new eyes, and... nope. It's fine. It's got some great set-pieces, but I just don't understand the hyperbole. It is, at best, the 3rd best Mad Max movie
I remember seeing Fury Road in theatres with tempered expectations. It was a phenomenal experience. We were very surprised at how good of a movie it was.
Mad Max is big shoes to fill, and Fury Road managed it in a way that was so fresh I barely thought about the previous films. It truly stands alone and that's no easy feat. I do not find it derivative at all. If anything it pulled the franchise in a new direction.
Everything is just awesome. They made an awesome movie. The cars are awesome. The characters are awesome. The sounds and practical effects are awesome. The pace is awesome. It's just great stuff.
It surpasses mediocrity across all metrics. That's why it's more than "fine".
It was the first intro to Mad Max for a lot of people is why.
Children of Men was released very early here in Australia. There was very little prior buzz for the movie, almost no advertising at all. Hype was minimal, there was a little bit of buzz from the Venice International Film Festival but it was barely advertised and I had only vaguely known about it in passing based on reading some film discussion forum posts at the time, the concept sounding interesting to me. No one in that discussion had actually seen it.
I didn't even go to the movies to see it specifically, I went for The Departed, but I saw that Children of Men was showing and figured, what the heck.
Imagine going into that movie with zero expectations. I felt shellshocked afterwards. I go online, no one is talking about it. I watched what I still consider one of the greatest movies ever made and over the next few months it's like it doesn't exist.
I did eventually see The Departed, it's pretty great. I think I made the right choice though.
I'm just at beginning of the article, but I immediately have to disagree with something :) "...this remains one of the absolute best sci fi movies of the 21st century."
I'd say it's not just one of the best sci fi movies, it's one of the best movies of the 21st century, period. Definitely one of my all time favorites, despite some of its flaws, it wastes no time, has great pace, is a fully contained story and gets its point across very well. And I'm not even talking about how relevant some of its themes are.
...anyway, back to reading.
Interesting how the article is not mentioning the (inverted) Christian allegory as if that doesn't even exist. It's not even subtle if you actually watch the film, like that's almost the point of it.
The original book is even more explicit about that, like Theo does a makeshipt baptism on the infant amidst all the fighting.
I was going to say the same thing, there is so much Christian symbolism in the film that to not mention it at all makes me think the author is just not aware of the things the film is referencing.
I’ve been saying this for over a decade.
The parallels between that film and the UK as it currently is are harrowing.
I always joked I was going live in a house like Michael Kanes character, only to end up doing it.
A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.
The way the film depicts the treatment of immigrants was what always got me, I would joke (half) just wait till climate change makes southern Europe too hot to live in…
I hate being right!
Meanwhile Southern Europe (especially Spain and Portugal) is complaining about all the UK immigrants.
Don’t worry about them, they’ll be back when having a Sunday Roast in 45c heat isn’t fun anymore!
> A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.
A nice idea, if it weren't for the fact that the tax man can still get to you.
Not if I can hide our lane with bushes lol!
It's a nativity story; faith overcoming nihilism. Explicitly in the book, obliquely (but frankly obviously) in the film.
Sci-fi has always been the perfect vehicle for social commentary, because it does not instantly trigger anything inside people. It is an impossible story in an impossible world, so relax. If you want to write something about black and white people, you should write a story about purple and green people instead. That's how X-men escapes all the woke allegations.
I wonder if this is why people don't consider it a sci-fi story, no high tech and no stand-ins for real societal issues (like aliens in District 9)
> One particularly brilliant aspect I keep thinking about is how the movie ends. We don’t know what will become of Kee and her baby. [...] We want to think Kee and her baby will change things, but we don’t know for sure because the future is—quite literally, in the final scene—shrouded in fog.
When I first saw this movie, I think the last scene was just her with baby and dead protagonist in a boat, in the fog.
But when I rewatched it more recently, there was also the ship they were trying to reach appearing out of the fog.
Did this movie have two different ending versions? Or did I just misremeber or watched a damaged copy? What ending have you seen?
Mandela effect. The ship was always there, there are no alternate ending versions
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/iea5it/children_of_...
The movie always ended with a ship appearing and the sound of children's laughter over the credits, it's less ambiguous than people make it out to be
IMO it would be perfect to turn into a series, they could update it with references to the billionaire class, drones, AI, asymmetric warfare, immigration, pandemics, celebrity and the attention addiction economy!
Apple if you don’t mess up Neuromancer, please make this next!
Off top of my head, Silo has many of those things, eventually, the attention economy gets skewered a bit in Upload which is not from TVplus. Combat is so expensive for good live action maybe the best one can hope for is the depiction in something like Pantheon.
Please, no. Stories like these work because they are timeless. One of the reasons that TV nowadays is so boring is because every show runner wants to use it as a platform for their own social commentary.