I don’t usually receive replies.

People who write so coldly and aloofly are usually so full of credible and rational foundations that they have made up their mind long before the credits roll. They tend to look at paintings only to determine what the canvas is made of.

The evidence you produced to express your dislike for the story of the film is the same evidence that I can use. On one of the film’s many posters it read “The future’s a thing of the past”. Children were not being born. The world was getting older and coming to an end. Nothing new was being produced. This was not the future of Orwell or Kubrick or Philp K. Dick. So the same cliches you mentioned (the lost lovers reuniting, the succession of mother types, etc) points to the “same old story” theme readily apparent in most of the film. It was meant to create an atmosphere where there was no hope for the future. That there would be no new ideas.

Clive Owen’s character, Theo, was a man completely absent of hope. Apparent in an earlier scene of the film where he exclaims that humanity was over with long before infertility became a problem. Yet through all this he still sacrificed his life to save what could indeed be humanity’s last hope. Far from a two-dimensional character. He went from being a dispassionate automaton to a man passionately dedicated to getting the child of a stranger to safety.

I found your review superficial because you disliked the story of the film with a simplistic dismissal of a few minor thematic elements. The sequence with the ping-pong was a mere light-hearted moment between two former lovers (recall how he wept when she was killed).

The sequence where the soldiers stop to look at the baby was necessarily dramatic and no “sense of realism was lost”. This was a “humanity still has something going for it” kind of moment.

I will attack the critic all I want. Your review reeked of intellectual and aesthetic snobbery. I’ll stick to my “cliched rhetoric” over your sterile automaton analysis.

However, I have three points to make in reply.

Firstly, your comment is rather short on evidence to justify your argument or your conclusions about my review.

Secondly, please respect other peoples right to an opinion. If you don’t agree, attack the arguments that have been made, but do not attack the critic. Personal attacks generally hint at an “emotive” argument that lacks a credible (rational) foundation.

Thirdly, I welcome a continuing dialogue with you about this film, but you’ll need to come up with more than cliched rhetoric. For example: “it is and was way ahead of its time” – on what evidence can you justify this bland statement? how is ‘Children of Men’ in any way more advanced than any other film produced in 2006?

I look forward to further explication of your defence of ‘Children of Men’.

This film has only one real and major fault. It is and was way ahead of its time.

Such critics (snobs) like yourself probably are just frustrated that their missing something. Which is your fault and not that of the director.

That was the worst and most superficial review I have ever read.