i can't believe you're encouraging us to read what is basically a cliffs notes. The crazy monk I know would put an amazon link to the book and suggest we read it (especially after lorelei recommended it and I can attest it's not very long).

It might be time for CrazyMonk to get an affiliate account at Amazon... or he can always use mine.

You're all smart enough to know whether you want to read the book or not. I read the critique first, so after that I was curious to know specifically how the book differed from the movie. I may read the book at some point, but probably not within the next 12 months.

Wow, that was quite vitriolic. Not having seen the movie yet, I can't agree or disagree, but I don't see what's so terrible about reimagining a book significantly if it's done well.

Also, this person's criticism of the film's "moral ambiguity," IMO, is misdirected; life is chock full of moral ambiguity.

"What’s implausible about Cuarón’s conception is that no reasonable explanation is ever offered as to why so many people would risk their lives to get into an England that is suffering the same plague of childlessness, pollution, overcrowding, and oppression as everywhere else."

Eh? The entirety of the world has collapsed into anarchy and Britain is the only functional country remaining (presumably in part due to its natural geographic isolation). Why on Earth wouldn't people try to move from the anarchic toward the orderly?

This guy is weird.

Isn't he just confused? Why would he see fit to term the quasi-fascist British gov't in the movie as engaged in an intifada? I thought CoM was a pretty good movie, well-directed, but riddled with flaws in the plot and in the characters. If Cuaron wants to lift the core of some wierd Christian story and flip the politics into a different tale of redemption, by all means- if I were going to critique imagery in the movie, I would ask why the only pregnant woman is a black woman, her savior is a white man, the white man's evil opposite is a gun-toting black man who came to power by having the heroic white woman killed (it just kinda slides right into all those tropes)...?

Hmmm, I imagine you must be a bit sensitive to see it that way Jesse. I never thought of the black man as evil, just someone trying to do good in the wrong and selfish way. I would say the most evil character was that dreadlocked white dude. I saw Clive Owen and that black dude as two british people at odds with each other. I actually never thought of the racial implications. I am not sure if that is good or bad.

By the way, the "black dude" is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who was pretty awesome in Serenity and supposedly good in that HBO tsunami movie.

Yeah, he was also in Melinda and Melinda, Love Actually, and Four Brothers. He is, oddly enough, one of my favorite character actors working today.