Never Let Me Go (2010)
Directed by Mark Romanek
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy spend their childhood at an idyllic and secluded English boarding school. As they grow into adults, they must come to terms with the complexity and strength of their love for one another while also preparing for the haunting reality awaiting them.
17 connections found
View:
17 films that influenced Never Let Me Go
What critics say influenced Never Let Me Go
This revelation is not the film, nor is it the launching pad for escape plots and car chases, as if Romanek were making some oak-paneled accents-and-adrenaline mix of the Merchant-Ivory canon and Michael Bay 's " The Island ."
"Never Let Me Go" isn't all that original in plot, sharing a great deal with George Clayton Johnson's "Logan's Run" and 2005's " The Island ," but its treatment as a frighteningly skewed existential tale set in the real world makes it rather novel.
“Never Let Me Go” is one of the best treatments of the cloning issue that we’ve seen in films like “Part: The Clonus Horror” and its criminally imitative unofficial rehash “The Island.”
Think “ The Island ,” with more character development and less shit blowing up.
With films such as “The Island,” the sugar rush was provided in the ultimate fight for life.
Like Bay’s bombastic action epic The Island, Never Let Me Go is about a second class of citizens who are cloned and raised solely to provide donor organs for regular people in poor health.
The ultimate cinematic expression of the last example would be Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, in which, accidentally given a soul, a donkey dies for our sins.
"Never Let Me Go" isn't all that original in plot, sharing a great deal with George Clayton Johnson's "Logan's Run" and 2005's " The Island ," but its treatment as a frighteningly skewed existential tale set in the real world makes it rather novel.
Andrew Garfield (2007's " Lions for Lambs ") is an adequate Tommy, but no match for his two co-stars; too often, Garfield looks to be trying too hard to play his shy, sensitive role, and has a big breakdown scene near the climax that loses its impact by way of his overacting.
Advertisement
Directed by Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) from a screenplay by Alex Garland (28 Days Later and The Beach, both movie and novel), Never Let Me Go is based on Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting 2005 novel about three dewy youths coming of age in an alternate Britain.
Ishiguro is of course best known for The Remains of the Day, and thanks to a concise script by novelist and sometimes screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach, Sunshine ) the movie is remarkably faithful to the source book, something which counts both for and against it.
., The Beach), and Mark Romanek, the director (One Hour Photo), have created an alternate universe that exudes some of the creepy calm of Wolf Rilla's great English science-fiction flick Village of the Damned, but also the gloomy romanticism of Keats and Shelley.
While the complex triangle among these three forms the heart of Ishiguro’s narrowly focused novel, the precise screenplay by Alex Garland (The Beach) is filtered through Kathy’s perspective, specifically, her attempt to make a worthwhile life in this alternate England.
The film has been adapted by Alex Garland (The Beach, Sunshine) and directed by Mark Romanek, a well-respected music-video guru who made a small splash in the indie world with 2002's One Hour Photo.
Screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach) abides by Ishiguro’s decision to set this dystopic fantasy in the past, not the future.
While it sounds like a future shock gimmick out of Logan’s Run or Soylent Green, it’s actually a simple art symposium run by the mysterious Madame (Nathalie Richard).
Meanwhile, several supporting performances are exquisitely realized, from Sally Hawkins (2008's " Happy-Go-Lucky "), unforgettably compassionate as the against-the-grain Miss Lucy, to newcomers Isobel Meikle-Small and Ella Purnell as the younger Kathy and Ruth, confident and beyond natural?not to mention dead ringers for their adult counterparts.
During the first act of the film, director Mark Romanek (“One Hour Photo”) take full advantage of the charming yet vaguely sinister effect conveyed by orderly, healthy rows of neatly dressed schoolchildren singing in British accents before a faculty of “guardians” that includes chilly Charlotte Rampling and friendly Sally Hawkins (“Happy-Go-Lucky”).
While Ishiguro is more circumspect about this — in the novel, narrator Kathy talks around her feelings for Tommy — director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) and screenwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later) commit to a story motivated by a love unrequited and deferred.
Mark Romanek ("One Hour Photo") has directed "Never Let Me Go" with great restraint.
Adapted from the highly regarded novel by Kazuo Ishiguro by director Mark Romanek ("One Hour Photo"), this ambitiously restrained film will most likely please fans of the book's dire speculative vision, even if it leaves others wondering why Ishiguro's gruesome, even sadistic premise merits such tender artistic ministrations.
There is a limitation, however, to Romanek's sense of drama, as was the case with his creepy earlier feature, "One Hour Photo."
Never Let Me Go, with thanks to director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) and screenwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later), is an adult entertainment that exudes sophistication and cleverness.
Romanek, an American who cut his teeth on music videos and One Hour Photo, does a decent job of imitating the austere settings and chilly sophistication of British period melodrama.
Advertisement
Romanek, a noted music-video whizz whose second feature this is, does an important job laying the story’s emotional foundations with his younger actors, and the cinematography by Adam Kimmel (Capote) has a chilly elegance.
He isn't out to visually dazzle viewers?even if the film is very well shot by cinematographer Adam Kimmel (2005's " Capote "), making haunting use of the English countryside and shore?but to explore the struggle of the human condition to do something with one's life before it's over.
Although Romanek's film is built around a sci-fi core, it's not set in some dystopian, "Blade Runner"-style future.
Blade Runner ’s replicants they most certainly are not.