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In a vaguely dystopian alternative present (Never Let Me Go opens in 1978 and ends approximately now), a bunch of uncanny little children grow up cloistered in an austere English boarding school called Hailsham. They're told they're "special," encouraged to make art and keep their bodies healthy, and corralled safely within the grounds by legends of gruesome murderers lurking just beyond the walls. "How do you know they're true?" asks a newly arrived teacher who is totally about to blow the lid off this bitch. The children can barely fathom the existence of the question. "Of course they're true! Who'd make up stories as horrible as that?" Every once in a while, a couple of men with a truck full of broken garbage show up and the kids flock to "buy" things with creepy little good-behavior tokens. It is all very not quite right.
The secret is that the Hailsham kids are clones created by the government from the tissue of ne'er-do-wells in order to provide organ transplants ("donations") for nonclones with janky livers and such. After graduation, they're sent out into the world—free-range clone kidneys!—where they're welcome to eat sandwiches, play soccer, look at porn, and fall in love for a couple of years before they die of not-having-lungs.
Stranger Personals
The story concerns three young Hailsham graduates—Keira Knightley (gauntly villainous), Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man!), and Carey Mulligan (awwwww)—struggling with the cognitive dissonance of being told you are not a person. The sci-fi setup sleeps unobtrusively behind the action—the clone stuff is just a means to get to novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's message. Never Let Me Go is really a story about friendship and jealousy and the cool ease with which humans dehumanize each other out of self-interest. It's a beautiful, sad, riveting movie.
HOWEVER. Some questions. You expect me to believe that there wouldn't be a clone-people civil rights movement before the ink was even dry on this cuckoo legislation? Is this a British stiff-upper-lip thing? Come on, clone people! Tip over a Dumpster or whatever you call it! The government is literally about to KILL YOU. Second of all, instead of having science invent human cloning to keep organs fresh for needy patients, why not just put them to work on a REALLY, REALLY GOOD REFRIGERATOR? Last time I checked, actual human people die all the time. Like literally all the time. Pro tip: USE THOSE ORGANS. Third of all, this is a ridiculously expensive program funded by my tax dollars. If I know anything about white people (not to brag, but I am kind of an expert), they would obviously get some poor brown people from some other continent for this shit! Come on!
But like I said, the story isn't the point. The message is the point. People are people. Legalize gay marriage. 
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That had romance too.
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Still epic, nonetheless.
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But what do I know, I'm just another mindless brown cog in the teeming billions of Asians that clearly never question anything anybody comes up with, right?
Speaking of, I read The Handmaid's Tale the other day! How come you North Americans don't question that construct? We would never let ourselves submit to such a life.
In other words: could you please tag this post as "spoiler alert", and not include said spoilers in the RSS feed for Slog?
I know it sounds like a little thing... I just feel like I would have appreciated the book a lot less if I had known about the whole organ thing from page 1.
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Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan but spend most of his childhood and adulthood in England. If you've read any of his other books - Remains of the Day, anyone? - his characters and the writing tend to keep their emotional distance from the reader. And it's about an ENGLISH BUTLER. How English can you get? If anything, I think he's part robot.
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I haven't read the book, but I think I might. And when I get to the part where the secret is revealed, I'll think only of you, Lindy.
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But thanks for playing.
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@16 - well, yeah, there is that. I'm not saying any country's without its dumbfuck regressionists, I live in the local regressionist hq and am slightly nervous about this most of the time, but half your political system being skewed that way is a tad creepy.
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What the fuck are you talking about?
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Thank you for housing this idiot. Beautifully.
@Lindy
You fucking rock. Awesome review. You're a brilliant, hilarious writer. Keep it up!
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Every time Mulligan cries, which she does no less than four times, it's that awful movie crying where there is no real sobbing, or even a change of expression...just leaky eyes in which somebody off-camera dripped a few drops. Nobody in the film has a true and genuine emotion ever, and thus it's impossible to feel anything other than detached admiration at the lovely English landscapes. The one big emotional moment, if you want to call it that, when Spider-Man yells at the top of his lungs outside the car, was given away in the preview, for Christ's sake! Not that it matters; after all that precedes it, the scene has zero impact, and actually feels a little desperate, as if the filmmakers spliced in some footage at the last second in the cutting room when they realized what a dead fish they had on their hands.
It's completely inert and drama-free. And romance-free. And interest-free. There is no plot. They're clones, they're going to die, and then they die. The last hour of the film would be a horrendous slog if you remotely cared about anybody in the film (which, I suppose, makes me grateful I didn't).
After it was over, my wife and I tried to spin it differently; maybe they intended the characters to be inhuman. Perhaps that was the point; we actually shouldn't feel bad about harvesting their organs, since the clones are so obviously devoid of real human motivations (why don't they ever just try and get away, for Christ's sake???). But we were just reaching, grasping for something that would give the money and time investment some meaning.
In conclusion, Never Let Me Go sucks, and if it gets nominated for Best Picture, I'll fly down to LA and throw hand grenades at the Kodak Theater until it's nothing but a steaming pile of rubble.
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