Children of Men is an intense and incredible movie, but also a tough one. There are very few typical futuristic elements in a movie set 20 years hence, basically since things have gone to shit in a big way. But here’s a couple:
A virtual keypad used by a wealthy young man who may have been autistic. He was not able to interact with other people and he was required to take pills. That’s all we know about him.
The buses are old and run-down, but they feature digital billboards with full-motion advertising.
The film played with time in an interesting way. Very little obvious sense of the future, fashions resembled today’s, London simply looked more like Mumbai (or Mexico, as the directed had suggested) than what we might think of today. And familiar songs (i.e., King Crimson) swing between the soundtrack and Muzak-like background that the characters hear in posh settings. And so the Battersea Power Station (where art is being preserved) is a location…with a pig floating in the background.
Yes, the pig from the Floyd album cover for Animals.
detail
Update: a reel of displays, interfaces, fake ads, and other visual artifacts is here [via DesignObserver]
Tags: animals, battersea power station, children of men, dystopia, future, movie, ping floyd, sf, speculative fiction, virtual keypad, vision
[...] When the DVD comes out, I want an annotated version that cites all the pertinent cultural referents. The intertubes have already pointed out that the flying pig alludes to the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals, Banksy’s graffiti art is on display, or how the credits end exactly the way T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ends. The biblical/religious allusions (naming the character Theo(-logy), the exceedingly maculate conception, Theo’s sandals (flip-flops). I want a pop-up video version of the film. [...]
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