Suspension of disbelief

While I didn't have too much trouble believing in the science or allegory of what is happening or that evil happens and is still happening in the world, I did have difficulty believing the level of passivity of the clones to what their lives ultimately meant. I had trouble accepting that all of these children (looked like a couple hundred at least in the one school) would be so easily brainwashed and would never attempt rebellion without any abuse to break them down. When you hear stories of brainwashing, it seems to always occur with added abuse--torture, withdraw of food, water or sleep--something. These kids are treated well. They are raised in a very normal fashion that aided their congnitive development, hence they should have fairly easily figured out what was happening to them, how and why but they don't seem to even be aware of what is happening to them until they are told point-blank by the headmistress. The kids come off as massively stupid although there is no reason for their stupidity.

I can even believe the allegory as to how this relates to my own life. I definitely feel that I am living others agenda and not my own and trapped in it, etc. but it angers and frustrates me. These kids don't seem to have an emotion about what is happening until it is spelled out to them and then they still continue to go along with it.
While I could even believe that some of them would continue to go along with it, there's bound to be some of these kids who wouldn't. I would assume that at least half of them would have taken off immediately or soon after the experience of their first donation. Someone on here posted that they have no papers or that they were being policed but that's just it, they are not being policed, guarded or controlled in any external way. If they are, it's not being shown in the movie. They seem to have massive amounts of freedom to come and go as they please. They just go along with it. No question.

Some people are saying that the audience should just go along with everything that is happening in the movie for artistic appreciation and the ultimate meaning. Well there are some movies I have seen that this movie reminds me of such as Gattaca, Blindness and The Addiction--all stories using allegory and metaphor to comment on the human condition--but I had no problem with the suspension of disbelief with any of them. I had no problems with the structure or logic of any of them. Of course, check out the Blindness board and it's full of people who find everything about it hard to believe. I had no trouble believing any of it.

I'd give this movie a 7 stars in here. It's beautifully executed, it's heartbreaking, deep and meaningful but I have problems with some of it's logic.

"Wait a minute. You know that scum? He licked my window!" --Amanda (Diagnosis Murder)

e_esoteric^

Good post :)

I would ramp the 'slavery' analogy up one more notch.

What happens in this story, to me, is also a form of cannibalism.

And what better way to 'excuse' this in 'polite society' than dressing it up (so to speak) and saying it is for the 'greater good', which is just an excuse for advocating that one chosen human life has been deemed more 'life worthy' than another's.






~~ If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story ~ Orson Welles

Remember, we are seeing this story from Kathy's point of view and the only really see much of two other donors. In Hunger Games we could have seen this from many other points of view and it may have appeared the same (we saw Katniss'); in Divergent, had we seen the class three years earlier, or seen the story of children who followed their parents without questions, we would have seen a similar story. Not all protagonists are heroes... not all stories are exciting. This doesn't mean that they don't have heart or merit.

This story is more believable that most dystopian sci-fi fiction. I had no problem suspending disbelief because history has brought us even more brutal forms of genocide. As horrifying as the premise of the story is, it's pretty tame stuff compared to the Nazi death camps, or Cambodia during the Pol Pot era, or the genocidal campaign in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Just watched this film for the first time, and I agree with Samus's points above.

Also, many people have been questioning the passivity of the children, and whether this was realistic.

To some extents, yes... passivity can be a defense against further harm. But in the case of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, there may also be something different about them. I first noticed this when Miss Lucy is talking to the children in her classroom. Outside the rain is pouring. Anyone who has taught knows that kids go crazy when the weather is bad, but these children were just sitting, listening, becalmed.

Tommy at first gets picked on because he is different: he rages; he draws elephants when the other children just copy each other or draw what they're told. He does get told that his art doesn't matter by Miss Lucy and gives up, but when he takes up his pens again, he draws picture after picture, all of elephants. What does this say about his ability to make different choices?

Indeed, during Miss Lucy's role play, Tommy stalls when trying to place an order that isn't the same as the one child before ordered. The young adults refer to this experience on their trip to the coast, but when they are in the cafe ordering for real, they find they can't choose from the menu and all have to take the other boy's lead.

As to their fates, they find they do have a choice: they can be a carer, and maybe live a while longer. Though, as we see from Kathy, their life span is limited to pretty much the same time as the donors they have been looking after, so it's only a choice to occupy themselves with a job that enables them to further contemplate their own mortality, rather than just sit and watch TV in the cottages with their friends. The other seeming option is deferral, but they have to have heard of these options before considering them. At no point do they consider they could do/be something else if they rebelled.

Essentially, they are free range. Conditioned not to go out of bounds when young, they could go anywhere when they live at the cottages, but they only ever choose to visit locations they have been told about: the centres; the boat; the address of the teachers they were given. Of course, with a prompt, they can make a different choice, but that prompt needs to be there. Something has clipped their wings.

Whatever it is, this is perhaps what prompts the discussion of ethics in the first place: how Miss Emily puts similar pictures together to show how the children are incapable of original creative concepts seems to be one of the factors in the discussion of their souls. What a shame Tommy's original little blue elephant never made it to the 'gallery', because of course they have souls, no matter how differently they think to non-clones.

Just watched this film for the first time, and I agree with Samus's points above.

Also, many people have been questioning the passivity of the children, and whether this was realistic.

To some extents, yes... passivity can be a defense against further harm. But in the case of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, there may also be something different about them. I first noticed this when Miss Lucy is talking to the children in her classroom. Outside the rain is pouring. Anyone who has taught knows that kids go crazy when the weather is bad, but these children were just sitting, listening, becalmed.

Tommy at first gets picked on because he is different: he rages; he draws elephants when the other children just copy each other or draw what they're told. He does get told that his art doesn't matter by Miss Lucy and gives up, but when he takes up his pens again, he draws picture after picture, all of elephants. What does this say about his ability to make different choices?

Indeed, during Miss Lucy's role play, Tommy stalls when trying to place an order that isn't the same as the one child before ordered. The young adults refer to this experience on their trip to the coast, but when they are in the cafe ordering for real, they find they can't choose from the menu and all have to take the other boy's lead.

As to their fates, they find they do have a choice: they can be a carer, and maybe live a while longer. Though, as we see from Kathy, their life span is limited to pretty much the same time as the donors they have been looking after, so it's only a choice to occupy themselves with a job that enables them to further contemplate their own mortality, rather than just sit and watch TV in the cottages with their friends. The other seeming option is deferral, but they have to have heard of these options before considering them. At no point do they consider they could do/be something else if they rebelled.

Essentially, they are free range. Conditioned not to go out of bounds when young, they could go anywhere when they live at the cottages, but they only ever choose to visit locations they have been told about: the centres; the boat; the address of the teachers they were given. Of course, with a prompt, they can make a different choice, but that prompt needs to be there. Something has clipped their wings.

Whatever it is, this is perhaps what prompts the discussion of ethics in the first place: how Miss Emily puts similar pictures together to show how the children are incapable of original creative concepts seems to be one of the factors in the discussion of their souls. What a shame Tommy's original little blue elephant never made it to the 'gallery', because of course they have souls, no matter how differently they think to non-clones.