Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Never Let Me Go by Mark Romanek




Anyone who knows me will tell you I love science fiction, and I especially love science fiction when it is clever, new, and refreshing. This brings me to Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go. Now I may have started this wrong by classifying Never Let Me Go as a sci-fi, but to a certain degree I have to admit that part of it makes me love it slightly more than I already did. As this review continues, I am not sure how much will be a spoil and how much won't.

Never Let Me Go is the delicate tale of an alternate history where cloning was discovered early in the 1900s and the clones were used to save the lives of the naturally born. The film follows three of these donors as they go to a school specifically for donors, fall in love, grow up, have hearts broken, and move towards completing their donations. It is a story about characters whom the audience at first feels sorry for, but goes on to realize these characters are living life the same way any other person does. It is a beautiful and tragic and intelligent story.

The film stars Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley as the three leads. Each actor has grown into their own since breaking into cinema, but, as she did in An Education, Carey Mulligan pulls the film along. It is rare to find an actress so in control of her performance, of every inch of her body that she can control every scene with a flick of the eye or tweak of the lips. Her Kathy H is the both full of hurt and beauty and complexity, it is another great performance. Knightley and Garfield are both incredible in their performances and support the head performance of Mulligan perfectly. This is definitely their film and relies so much on their interactions, and they delivery beautifully taking the audience on a personal journey of heartache and discovery rare in any sci-fi these days.

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