Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU I will only consider here the 1990 film with Faye Dunaway, not the novel beyond, nor of course the recent adaptation as a TV series that is not available on the DVD market.We are in the United States of America after it became the Republic of Gilead. I will not enter the Biblical meaning of this word that can be used to designate some regions of the old Biblical Israel and three characters in the Old Testament, among them the father of Jephthah, that crazy general who swore to have the first person coming to him after the battle if it is a victory sacrificed to God. He thus has to put his daughter to death.But that gives you the flavor of the story. In this Republic of Gilead, men are absolutely dominant and they have reinstalled or reinstated the standard total submission of women to go against the total dissolution of society before due to sexual promiscuity, abortion, family planning, contraception, artificial insemination, gender orientation, etc. Women have to go back to their main and only function in that male- dominated society: to give birth to babies conceived in the normal natural good old intercourse between a man and a woman. And that's where the story becomes bizarre or even squalid. Women are, like for men in Brave New World, divided into clearly defined groups that have to dress in a particular color. Grey is for the plain servants. Then, red is for the handmaids, those whose sole function is to procreate babies with the master of the household they are attached to. White is for some kind of religious characters who participate in various rites. Maroon is for the women who are controlling the handmaids, asg them wherever they are needed, and of course punishing them when "necessary." Blue is for the ladies of the various households whose babies are produced by the handmaids attached to them and their husbands. All men are in black. There is a last category of women: those who cannot be integrated into any category, particularly as handmaids and are the "girls" of some parties for the masculine elite. In other words, they are the escorts or working girls of the elite men of the society. The disease that is the cause of this situation is purely surreal, causing the sterility of most women and those who are not sterile are used as reproductive human chattel. The film though seems to hint that the man, Fred, Kate, the handmaid the story is centered on, should provide with a child, is sterile, and his sterile wife, Serena, suggests Kate should use the services of her husband's chauffeur, Nick. All that is of course sordid. During that time Fred, the Commander, is systematically hunting down the resistance with the clear objective of exterminating them. Today we call that genocide. Apart from Blacks and gays, the concept of resisting people is rather vague and we can wonder how this elite can live if there is no proletariat, even lumpen-proletariat to work for them. Fred falls in love with Kate, but that brings no pregnancy. Nick, on the other hand, falls in love with her too and she with him and that brings a pregnancy as if without equally shared love there is no pregnancy possible. When Serena learned that Fred had taken Kate to one of the elite's parties and that she had worn her own black clothing instead of her red dress, she becomes furious and wants a vengeance. On the other hand, Nick and Kate want to escape Gilead with their future baby.That's the dramatic knot in the thread of that story, a Gordian knot actually and it will have to be cut, but how and for what future?The fact that this old novel and this here old film have been ed for a TV series has, of course, to do with the election of the present President of the USA. The rise of bigotry and populism in the USA today is seen as dangerous. Just the same way The Man in the High Castle, an old novel stating the same type of dystopia centered on men essentially has been brought back to life by Amazon Prime, this Handmaid's Tale, centered as it is on women, had to be brought back to life too. The present period in our globalized world is bringing up the question of refusing change and even dreaming of a full U-turn and going back to what the world was in the past, the Old Testament in this case, A victory of Japan and in 1945 in The Man in the High Castle. The pessimist are going to say that will lead to the Third World War. The optimist will say that God or man's rational wisdom will prevail and the Singularity of Intelligent Machines will bring humanity eternal life and absolute peace with no work what so ever to do. The dream of a permanent siesta or farniente. Though it may very well be a Matrix that leads to eternal slavery and war.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

ehobba Boring as heck with the worst possible acting. Like acting so terrible and emotionless, it makes Kristen Stewart in Twilight look like she could play the Joker. The book, which I had to analyse at school, was tedious, disturbing in its descriptions, and had a horrible ending - but I would honest to god think that watching paint dry would interest me more than this plot less trash that has (no joke) ten-minute sex scenes that we thankfully skipped past. It is even less about feminism than the book and fails to explain how their society came to be the way it is (not that the book really did that either). Don't put yourselves through the torture - if I could've given it a negative star rating, I would have.

billcr12 Margaret Atwood's future is bleak. The world has deteriorated into a Combination of poisoned air and water and women are 99% infertile. The men in charge have developed an elaborate system for selecting those still able to produce children. Kate (Natasha Richardson) is captured attempting to escape to Canada and is forced to become a handmaiden, as in the Old Testament. The commander (Robert Duvall), is married to Serena (Faye Dunaway), who is too old to have children, and so Kate becomes a surrogate. A bizarre ritual follows, with the commander doing the deed with the handmaid resting between Serena's legs. The government has a school of sorts, where the women are brainwashed with constant religious and patriotic messages. The story is strongly influenced by both Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. 1984 was written in 1948, and Atwood's book in 1985. Even though they have similar themes, Handmaid stands out as an accurate look at our current situation. The right to privacy has become a sick joke and we are sedated by reality television, with its mastermind now in charge. A truly frightening movie , one perfectly appropriate for our current times.

Robert J. Maxwell I haven't read Margaret Atwood's novel but judging from this movie version of it, I'd have to guess she dislikes social constraints, war, patriarchal societies, and religion.It's the future, kind of, without much in the way of futuristic technology but a social order that amount to a projection of women's fantasies circa 1970. The Commander (Robert Duvall) rules the roost, and what a roost it is, and with what a codified pecking order. Toxic substances have so polluted our resources that 99 out of 100 women have been rendered sterile. The remaining fertile ones are put through a kind of Fascist Esalen Institute and have their collective consciousness raised. Like the rest of the community -- except for the Rebels who blow things up once in a while -- the school is based on the Old Testament and everyone goes around mouthing clichés like "may the Lord open." The more adaptable of the handmaids graduate and their wardrobe changes from scarlet to a rich blue. The ones who misbehave are punished. Slight infractions include such perversions as masturbation and they lead to the bastinado. More serious breaches of the code, such as fornication, lead to the noose. Sex is for procreation, not recreation. And the Commander has his choice of students whom he tries ad seriatim to impregnate. What he doesn't know is that while his chosen partners may be fertile, he's shooting blanks. The reason he doesn't know this is that men aren't tested, just women.The plot is a little too crazy to describe in detail. The eponymous handmaid is Natasha Richardson, and she takes a lover on the side, Aidan Quinn. The Commander gets what's coming to him, I guess, and the film ends hopefully.Wow, this story dates badly, gushing as it does from the same well as "The Stepford Wives." The difference is that "The Stepford Wives" was so ludicrous as to be funny. (Even the author, Ira Levin, joked about it.) This one takes itself seriously.I don't know where to begin in trying to assess this. The only time this brainwashed student body can express anger is during public executions. There is a scene in which the red-robed young women of the school loose their pustular ion on some poor guy who's supposedly raped a woman. (Actually, "he's a political.") This horde of women descend on him like a pack of African wild dogs and literally rip his head off. It may be a little unlady-like but it happens. When the Mojave Indians waged war, they would stun their enemies and throw the bodies back to the women, where the victim would be systematically deboned and excoriated. And that's nothing, compared to my ex wife.There are many different ways to impregnate a woman to insure the survival of the species but anything other than the old-fashioned way is abjured because the Bible doesn't have anything in it about modern technology. Natasha Richardson must put up with matter-of-fact couplings during her periods of ovulation, and she winds up cutting Duvall's throat, even though he's grown a little fond of her over the months. Not in LOVE with her. He's too insensitive for that. But fond of her in the way that we might be fond of a pet cat or dog.There is a shot of black people being rounded up and hauled away by armed guards. And that scene reminded me of a popular essay from the late 1960s, ed from hand to hand, when everyone wanted Victim Power. It was written, I think, by some college student and entitled "The Student as N*****." Everyone wanted to be compared to blacks -- exploited, looked down upon, and generally held in contempt.The movie reflects this desire for victimhood paradoxically. It rejects the exercise of power by endorsing the empowerment of women. Most "anti-war" movies are similarly configured. We can revel in the horrors our men and women undergo while winning the war and still leave the theater filled with jingoistic pride and ready to kick butt someplace else. Cecil B. DeMille was fond of demonstrating how disgusting decadence and sex were by showing us as much of it as he could.The acting isn't bad, except for Victoria Tennant, who has never uttered a believable line in any of her films. Natasha Richardson is about perfect in the part of the victimized handmaid. She's been there before as Patty Hearst. And she fits the part -- petite, winsome, and thoughtful too. Elizabeth McGovern has the role of the requisite wise guy, secretly rebellious, earthy and full of common sense. Every prison story needs this character.I don't really think, though, that men want to dominate women in the heartless way this film shows, though no doubt that men would like cooperative and, at times, compliant wives, just as women would like husbands who aren't ashamed to talk about relationships and weep. If nothing else, every human being, regardless of sex, has a mother and that fact must in some way shape our attitudes towards women in general. Atwood's paranoid vision is flawed, an obsession rather than a fully thought-out image of what we all are.