A SCARY VISION OF THE FUTURE : "NEVER LET ME GO"

I want to get one thing out of the way straight off the bat; neither the characters nor the setting in this film (and the book it was based on) have anything whatsoever to do with the orient. It was written, however by Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese writer of great renown and Booker prize winner (for his acclaimed novel Remains Of The Day). It is something in the way the whole book is written that makes me put the film in the “mythical orient”; it is not so much something concrete but an emotion, something in the air, in its whole state of being. Plus, as you know, the Japanese are the masters of sci-fi and things like alternative futures and dystopias; so just based on the subject matter, I think Never Let Me Go is in the right category…
Imagine a world were cancer is a distant dream. Human life expectancy is now in the low three-figure digits, sickness and pain are all but eradicated. Sounds like paradise? It may be for some… But for all the other people on the planet to benefit from these great advances, some must suffer, they must die very young, and get no more than a look into the wonderful things life has to offer… Never let me go is the stories of these people in this dystopia; we follow their lives, loves, dreams and ultimately their deaths as we are faced with some ethical and moral questions that we very well may need to ask ourselves if not now, sometime in the not terribly distant future…
I don’t want to give too much of the story away. The one problem I had with the film was that it spared the viewer the emotional impact of “realization” (You will have noticed that I have obviously concealed something from you in the previous paragraph). The book starts like a completely different genre; a period piece. You have an inkling something is not as it should be and the truth is not openly uttered until the middle of the book. Until that point you only have hints and clues and a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach coupled with the phrase “It couldn’t be… Could it?” Now, fair is fair, it would be tough to give that kind of suspense and surprise in a film… So what the film does is just cut to the chase straight off the bat and take the story from there. Within five minutes you will have a good idea what the second rather murky paragraph was all about. And I simply have to comment the genius and originality of the Kazuo Ishiguro’s story; it is one of those topics that we push to the backs of our minds now, but they are there, sitting waiting… We very well may have to face up to them some day. The things I’m talking about are not pleasant; but then again adult life sometimes has very little to do with what you find pleasant and what you don’t…
Artistically the film was good. Even though for me personally the brilliance of the book overshadowed the film slightly, I can’t actually fault the film either. The young cast made up of Keira Knightly, Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, The Imaginarium of Docor Parnassus) and Carey Mulligan (An Education) are faultless in their performances. Never Let Me Go takes place in an alternative reality very similar to yet completely distinct from our own and I have to say that the air of eeriness and “something is not quite right” is well rendered. My only criticism would be that – and I do admit I may be a touch biased – the book struck me terribly and really affected me deeply. With the film, although it is intense in pieces the inevitable love story has been given a little more weight than in the novel and the “condition” of our heroes does not strike one as clearly as one might have expected… Nevertheless, even if it is the “light” version in comparison to the book you will be struck by it and it will give you a lot to think about… Yes indeed, medical advances can be scary things…