1. RyanGee

   9

   Creating a haunting yet provocative science fiction piece of art, director Mark Romenek creates a film that will consume its audience with heartbreak and despair. Never Let Me Go is best approached with little information of the sequential plot in Ishiguro's novel. In trying to simplify the premise, the film follows the life of three students deriving from Hailshaim school. The highlight of the film is the performance by Carey Mulligan. She creates so much pathos in her character, it is surreal how real her emotions are. Mulligan executes this film with so much poise; Even her subtle facial expressions create goosebumps. This film is a masterpiece. The cinematography in the film is memorizing; The natural shots and the exposure of the characters reactions add to the chilling manner of the film overall. Moreover, the emotions that are enabled by the casts performances are simply haunting and heart-crushing. I have never seen so many people cry in one movie theater, it is really a defining film in combining drama with science fiction. Technique-wise, Romeneks film is the pinnacle of perfection; But many of its small flaws keep it from being an overall unblemished film. The films pace is much too slow and it some times experiences a directionless path, where it seems that the film is heading towards nowhere. At times there was a lack of forwards which negatively influences the films effectiveness. In addition, while the film does create some great heartbreak, there is somewhat a distance between the characters and the audience. While the cast is not at fault, the plot and given details make the characters only somewhat relatable, it seems as if they derive too much from an alternate world to be one of our time. But in the end, the film is an emotion-provoking film that will strike the heart of its audience in a way that is devastating yet memorable. It does not quite reach perfection, but the beauty, heart, and thought of the film covers its small blemishes.… Expand

   • Helpful? 7 of 8 users said Yes.
2. StevieGJD

   8

   This is a melancholy and brooding movie with very good acting. There are two stories simultaneously going on. The first has to do with the Orwellian government's purpose for the existence of the main characters. The second is about a jealous and petty girl who intentionally thwarts the development of a relationship involving her friend, only to try and make up for it later in her life. The contra-position of these two stories is very interesting. The movies Coma and The Island both dealt with the Orwellian part of this movie's story, both in a completely different (and I would say less successful) way. Those movies assumed that what was happening was so horrible that all one has to do is expose it for it to stop. This movie assumes that it is accepted by society. It ends up being a fresh and unique take on the subject. Well worth seeing and very thought provoking.… Expand

   • Helpful? 1 of 2 users said Yes.
3. Shiira

   5

   This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. It's the saddest music in the world. By itself, Judy Bridgewater's "Never Let Me Go" is just another torch song of no particular distinction, it's what Kathy H. brings to the canned performance; her naivety as a listener which makes the ordinary ballad so heartbreaking, when she misinterprets "baby", the singer's plea to a careless lover, as a petition to a baby, in the literal sense, that he/she "never let [her] go". While the cassette tape plays in the empty dorm room, Kathy H. slow-dances with a pillow, the baby she'll never conceive, in her arms, with Madame watching from outside the doorway, a little bleary-eyed, flummoxed by the young girl's humanity. In an instant, she knows the "gallery" is just window-dressing. These children do indeed have souls. This scene, more than any from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, demonstrates the profundity of inhumaneness at work here, made all the more strange by the genteel setting of the Hailsham school, whose guardians, despite their advocacy against treating these children inhumanely, still believe that the final solution is a necessary evil. These unseen forces count on the guardians to poison their minds with propaganda about the world outside Hailsham, and the world inside their bodies.This ignorance; this resignation, that these children have been instilled with all their lives, since birth, made them feeble, made them strange. The pantomime Ishiguro describes in his Man Booker Prize-short-listed book, an imitation of motherhood which Kathy H. performs in a context so grossly misapprehended because of her own circumscribed purview, is a grotesquerie that makes the girl too vulnerable, too much like a freak. With the same stiff upper lip he applied to his third novel "The Remains of the Day", the pre-eminent writer of contemporary British fiction has no reservations about putting Kathy H., Tommy D. and Ruth in tragi-comic situations that serve them up for ridicule. Too bad the film version of "Never Let Me Go" chose to iron out the flaws which made the students less bland. They're maladjusted, but the film wants to ensure that audiences like them. In the book, Kathy H. had lots of sex with strangers, Tommy D. didn't seem nearly as thoughtful like how Andrew Garfield plays him, and Ruth was a whole lot more machiavellian at Hailsham, and especially at the Cottages. But most egregious of all, what "Never Let Me Go" loses in the translation from novel to film, is the original meaning of the Judy Bridgewater song, since the filmmaker changes Ishiguro's lyrics by replacing "baby" with "darling", a term of endearment that Kathy H. associates with Tommy D.. The dystopian film loses its key estranging moment in order to make the girl more relatable to the moviegoer, who can better identify with a girl in the throes of puppy love. Kathy H. has a better grip on her feelings in the movie than the book, an effect, however, that makes her indistinguishable from any other boarding school girl with growing pains. Instead of Madame, it's Ruth who's the quiescent observer, and like her best friend, she too seems overtly sophisticated and worldly, not at all how Ishiguro envisioned them, his "poor creatures", as Madame later describes them, but in the film, the jealous girl understands Kathy H.'s designs on Tommy D., understands the gist of the song, which gives her the impetus to steal the boy's heart. "Never Let Me Go" is too conventional for its own good. The love story plays too prominent a role in the narrative, at the expense of the dislocative atmosphere which drives the book, but disappointingly, not the adaptation, whose revamped character seem to understand the difference between love and sex, tears and come, in spite of their limited experiences. As adults, when Kathy H., Tommy D., and Ruth begin to fulfill their destinies as "carers"(Kathy H.) and "donors"(Ruth and Tommy), "Never Let Me Go" pays the price of loving its characters too much. The filmmaker wants the trio to be savvy about love, but naive about dying, but they seem too smart, so when the former Hailsham students don't seem fully cognizant to the fact that "completion" and death are a matter of semantics with little or no differentiation, it rings false. They should escape, but "Never Let Me Go" avoids that banality, so prevalent in the third act of so many genre films, especially science fiction, because Hailsham turned them into good little soldiers who wouldn't desert their mission and escape the fate which awaits them. In one scene, acting on a tip about a boat, Kathy H. drives Tommy D. and Ruth to the coastline, but the boat is purely for sightseeing. Marooned on the sand, nobody seems terribly disappointed that the boat isn't on the water. If it was, would they have the survival instinct to sail away? After Ruth dies, clearing the way for Kathy and Tommy to get their "deferral", why don't they just get in the car and take off?… Expand

   • Helpful? 2 of 4 users said Yes.
4. Dayna

   2

   This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Saw this at TIFF I don't think have ever been so bored watching a movie in my life. There was no one or nothing to route for. They just sat around and waited to die. At least In the movie The Island, when they discovered what they were in for they fought to stay alive. These people sat around a whined about how unfair it was. I wanted to scream "THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!" But that something never came. I don't respect people who don't at least try to change their circumstances. Awful story, Normal I cry like a baby at these movies and I didn't shed a single tear because I didn't Feel anything for any of them.… Expand

   • Helpful? 2 of 4 users said Yes.

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