Movie Review: Never Let Me Go

                 Ever had to go to the movies by yourself?  It's a weird experience.  Once when I was in college, I took a couple of intersession classes at Southeast Missouri State University right before the summer semester.  It was too far to commute back and forth daily from my parent's house, so I just shacked up in the campus dorms for about three weeks.  Turns out you can't get cable for only three weeks, so I spent a fair amount of time at the $1 theatre at the local mall.  It really wasn't that uncomfortable until I found myself alone at a showing of Wild Things...then I felt like a total perv.

                 When my husband couldn't make it to the advanced screening of Never Let Me Go, I decided I could brave it alone.  Scheduled at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, it was about a 30 minute drive from our apartment and if it hadn't been for the GPS, I would have never have found it.  The trek took me down Albany's famed Lark Street, which was hopping!

              Never Let Me Go is based off the 2005 novel by Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro.  Starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and total new hot-thang Andrew Garfield, the film centers around three characters Kathy, Ruth and Tommy.  Previews of the movie led me to believe it was a period piece (after all isn't that what Keira Knightley does best?) but I didn't really catch much of what the plotline was supposed to be.  As the movie develops audiences learn that the world that Kathy, Ruth and Tommy live in is quite different than our own.  The three spend their childhood at Hailsham, an idyllic English boarding school.  But when they leave the school, they learn the terrible truth about their existence. 

                The three discover they are human clones, created to provide donor organs for transplants.  The film is divided in multiple parts, chronicling phases in the lives of its main characters and spans the 1960s to 1994.  Uh, it was weird.

                To sum it up best:  it was sort of a period piece with a futuristic plotline.  I

 seriously might have bought into it had it been set in a different time period.  There was great acting, but crazy depressing storyline.  And have you ever been so distracted by a character's hair that you couldn't see past it?  Carey Mulligan's hair was so bad in the middle of the movie, I just kept thinking "why didn't that weed wacker just finish the job?" 

              Fans of the book will know what they are in for, but for the rest of us...this is one of those movies that is dark and depressing and wins every film award possible.  Certainly not a blockbuster, the film has made only a fraction of it's $15 million budget and was released in select theatres back in mid-September.  Although set in England, the film is not scheduled to be released until January 2011 in the United Kingdom.  Maybe they'll like it better?  This was one of the first movies I've sat through and watched people get up and leave...also pretty sure I heard someone snoring a few rows behind me. 

             While I think the overall lesson of the film was to live life while you can, I don't think this is going to be one that I Redbox in my future....

Here's the trailer: