It wasn't all out war, just random acts of violence from fringe groups. Did you see the first minute of the movie?
There was a lot of heavy fighting, as I recall. While yes there were pockets of sanctuary, those engaged in the fighting were still blowing their energy budget.
They were all-out, which didn't make sense.
It wasn't likely that they'd have a balance of power, so the more powerful party should've just massacred the lesser one. Guerrilla tactics only work when your opponent is playing the good guy -- something that is done when one has long-term goals in the region. If you have no long-term goals then brutality rules. Nothing is as effective at stopping violence coming from a sector as killing everyone in it. But the movie showed regular combat, not roving death squads.
The movie was way off at portraying a bleak survivalist death-spiral world.
The hook was supposed to be that the baby was the world's only hope, but in so many of the surrounding actions they showed the people behaving as though they already had some other hope! Their behavior screamed, "focused, goal-oriented, and full of conviction." So we have a contradiction between what they are trying to force-feed you is the truth and what the world is saying is the truth. Without separating the two views with some explanation, it's damning.
Purpose is subjective, so you can't just declare, "The baby is more important than their value structure." If it works for them, it works for them. And if it works for them, they don't need the baby. If they don't need the baby, then the baby isn't relevant. If the baby isn't relevant, then why the hell are we following it?
That's why the movie falls apart. It fails to set up its own core premise.
You presume, incorrectly, that people are rational beings.
I presume that humans are human. It's a good place to start.
A conservatard isn't a rational being. I can model one just fine:
Place an inadequate learning computer in a complex world. The computer will fail to properly model the world, leading to many outputs that are in error. If errors cause pain, and pain leads to fear, through meta-analysis this computer will eventually learn to fear any novel conclusion it reaches. In avoidance of fear it will devalue any untested conclusion, resulting in a strong preference for conclusions that were tried previously and did not output errors. Combine this with its inadequacies at modeling by which it affirms the consequent to invalidly conclude that the current condition must be in line with the condition that originally led to the preferred conclusion, and you have spidey07.
Not very difficult.
Even worse, you presume that people in groups act only to benefit the group.
No, all my work stems from the individual.
You are not going to be able to work out how I model people. Your sifting to match patterns can only match to lesser patterns as you do not have access to patterns that are beyond your level.
Do you have any idea how inner city gangs work? Why they exist? Why they misbehave? They don't fight "for a future", they fight because there is no future.
I'd say they do fight for a future -- one in which their violence has cemented them a position. The cowardly drive-by being their method of choice just shows that they have no strength of position.
That they have no chance of winning doesn't mean that's not the underlying reason. They just have nothing else.
What are you talking about? The movie says just that, so why are you complaining?
Because the imagery contradicts it! You can't say, "Everything is meaningless," and then pull scenes from Braveheart!
Clive Owens' character changed when he saw the pregnant girl.
He was so far beneath anyone else that that didn't matter. His character at the end reached the same level that everyone else was at during the entire movie.
His journey should have been a miniature version of what the world would've experienced. Instead it was just a personal journey of a clinically depressed man in an otherwise okay (if weirdly violent) world.
I did not care about his personal problems, therefore I did not care about the baby. "The hope of the world," never factored in because the imagery showed that these people already had some personal hope. Also, if one woman has a baby, another is likely to -- so as soon as she was shown to be pregnant the problem looked to be well on its way to being over. And it never set up that the Human Project was even a hint of a valid avenue to anything.
28 Days Later did it right. Children of Men was awful. And it looks like the user reviews on IMDB strongly agree with me on its awfulness.
Most of your complaints seem to stem from a deep misunderstanding of the movie, not the movie itself.
The imagery of a movie is a part of the movie.
I understand how someone could perceive it as a good movie: If you take the narration at face value and then don't use your brain for anything but the main characters, it would be an excellent movie. But my intelligence is in the 99th percentile, so my mind tends to branch out. The main characters were not complicated in the least, giving me plenty of opportunity to work on the context. After seeing the context, I found the story didn't fit.
Not a good movie for highly intelligent people.