Never Let Me Go Reviews

Great movie, beautiful, of an amazing subtlety, and with two of the best actors from the new generation, Andrew Garfield and the ever-wonderful Carey Mulligan. If the outcome is hardly surprising, at least it’s entirely appropriate to the melancholy tone of the work, which also includes photography and soundtrack efficient. A sensitive movie, human, and that makes you think that deserves to be seen. It’s morbid, sad, it is “shocking”. It addresses an unusual theme and the way how human beings deal with themselves and think only about their own benefit, regardless of what caused the other, which already has scheduled destination. The actors are excellent, the film as a whole is very good, despite leaving a taste of something missing there..

For me to like a romance film, it needs good acting, a story that isn't solved in 15 minutes, and great drama. Never Let Me Go exceeds in all of those. I am not the huge romance fan, but I tend to like the ones like Revolutionary Road, Reds, and some very quirky movies. The acting was very well done especially by Carey Mulligan who is just seems to be great in everything she does, she is really impressive. Kiera Knightly and Andrew Garfield were also good in supporting roles. The story was actually very original with a little twist on the romance. I don't like to give away stories so you can find out for yourself. The drama starts out slow, but when they grow up the drama and the tension expands greatly. I kind of had a feeling I would like this movie, and it ended up being a very well done movie. It has drama, it has everything a romance movie should have. Don't waste your time with the typical 15 minute conflict in romantic comedies. Watch this for a good movie to watch for a love story with a little kick

Never Let Me Go is not quite the film it promises. If you are to believe the press it is a story of never-ending love full of romance and heartbreak. And while the film does contain these themes, they are quite shallow in their representation and their believability is stretched.

Carey Mulligan is fabulous as Cathy H, a donor in love with her childhood friend, Tommy (Andrew Garfield). Keira Knightly tops up the cast as irritating best friend, Ruth, who steal Tommy away from Cathy at an early age.

The film’s setting in an alternate world where children are bred to donate organs is deeply unsettling and the movie’s strong point. The moments that work best are those in which either the children are learning about their own destiny, or the adult versions are face to face with it. Through Cathy, who takes on the role of carer of fellow donors, we see the terrible reality of their short-lived lives. And when she meets Ruth and Tommy after 10 years apart and they have both started donating, the tragedy does hit deep.

It is therefore a shame that the love story, and the relationship between the three leads, falls short in quality. The portion where the characters are young and at school is flawless, drawing the links between the three carefully and with aplomb. It is when they turn into adults that things become strained. Cathy is still clearly very much in love with Tommy and remains so and this is where the love story works. However, Tommy has been in a relationship with Ruth for 10 years, and there are little, if any, signs that he is in love with Cathy. Yet despite this, we are expected to view their reunion after many years as joyous and a triumph for never-ending true love. Er, I don’t think so. If he did really love her why spend 10 years sleeping with her best friend (how the two are best friends is also unclear - they do not actually seem to get on at all) and then not trying to find her when she moves away?

So, a film and story which could have been delivered in a painfully poignant way exploring love and loss and ethical dilemmas, is merely a slow and somewhat pedestrian romance. Maybe the book is better.

An ethereal and heartbreaking work from Mark Romanek. An unstudied and well acted science fiction romance that takes the premise of the film to its unnatural and impressive conclusion.

To Read My Review of "Never Let Me Go" - awesomebarnhart.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/never-let-me-go-2010/

Tommy, Kathy and Ruth are students at Hailsham boarding school. Hailsham is an unusual school because the students there are going to have their lives tragically cut short. They are not like every other child, they do not get to grow and become doctors lawyers or whatever they want to be. Their destinies are predetermined, they are clones of people somewhere out in the world and when they reach the age of 25-30 they will begin to donate their organs. Tommy, Kathy and Ruth are forced to make the best of what the have and live and hope that there is a possibility that true love can be the one thing that saves them.

Never Let Me Go is a very emotional and engaging film. With the plotline already established and the ending seemingly inevitable, what we witness is these young people who are their own individuals live what little life they have. We see them struggle as kids, and then watch them grow into fine young men and women. What Never Let Me Go does so well in terms of plot is show their entire lives, from the time they are eight or nine until the time they complete their final donation.

Much like the youth of the real world, they are drawn to try new things and strive to be all they can be. The become curious about life, about sex,about travelling and seeing who their originals are. Never Let Me Go is a journey, it and is so well told because of its fine young cast. Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield have such great chemistry and Keira Knightley fits well with them. These three actors show their raw talents, and give off some of the finest performances in a long time. Garfield and Mulligan’s Chemistry is severely underused for the first half of the film. The final act is one where these two really begin to show their acting abilities, as their worlds come crashing in around them.

This is a beautiful and enriching film. The cinematography and the beautiful landscapes help add to the inevitable heartbreaking ending that is waiting for these characters. With their travels and their struggles we see their ability to live as humans, and to be happy. The saddest thing about Never Let Me Go is that we know these wonderfully developed characters are never going to live full and happy lives. This story is an easy one to get attached too simply because it is simple story being told in such a unique and emotional way. We as the people watching this movie begin to hope that True Love is the one thing that can set them free, and very much like these characters we are forced to see that not even the notion of True Love is enough to get us through everything.

Never Let Me Go will forever be one of the films that has been hugely overlooked. It has powerful and real messages. These people were real and felt the same way we did, and it was shame that they had to be used as sacrificial lambs so to speak. This movie works so well with the times we live because we are on the verge of so many medical break through, but are they worth it? This film should be getting major attention; it is one of the better films in 2010 and proves that the art of character development is not dead. In fact it proves that creating real life like characters is still the best way to get a message across.

Kathy: It had never occurred to me that our lives, so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them

Never Let Me Go is a brilliantly shot and brilliantly executed film, one of the better from the past year. The acting is as good as it gets.

NEVER LET ME GO is a thoroughly mediocre piece of melodramatic filmmaking. It's got all the ingredients to make for excellent commentary on subjects such as love, the fleeting nature of life, cloning and human organ transactions, and it winds up saying incredibly trite things about ALL of those themes. If that were it and the characters were still interesting and easy to care about, I may have still given it a mild recommendation, but instead, NEVER LET ME GO offers us one of the weakest, most ridiculous love triangles I've ever witnessed on the big screen. As it turns out, only one of our three protagonists is worth caring about, but that's only because of the talent of the actress playing her, not because of the film itself. The fact that the humdrum title is taken from a song that is heard more than once during the film is only one of the initial signs of the cinematic flatness that you'll be exposed to during NEVER LET ME GO's running time.

The film starts at Hailsham boarding school, which is located in a pretty remote location, and it certainly looks like the students here haven't seen much of the world. In fact, we soon discover that the teachers have told stories to the students about the "awful" things that have happened to anyone who has dared cross the gate that guards the school. We get to meet a particular trio of the kids: Kathy (Izzy Meikle-Small), Tommy (Charlie Rowe) and Ruth (Ella Purnell). It quickly becomes evident that Kathy is very interested in Tommy. Despite her being a child, it seems like more than a school crush, as she worries about him more than you'd expect. She notices Tommy speaking to their teacher, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), and immediately wants to know what he said to her. Ruth, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care much for Tommy, though she's completely aware of Kathy's interest in him.

One day, all of a sudden, much to Kathy's chagrin, it turns out that now Tommy and Ruth are together, even holding hands during recess time. This happens completely out of the blue, with absolutely no development on how or why Ruth made the decision to be with Tommy, and therein lies NEVER LET ME GO's first fault, which continues to snowball into the rest of the film; things happen jarringly, with little development or background to serve as explanation. On a similar line, one random day during class Miss Lucy decides to reveal to the students the reason why they're, um, "special" (but not special in a good way). This moment is horribly awkward; first of all, it's completely divorced from the way something as devastating as this is revealed to a group of children, and secondly, for the AUDIENCE, this is way too much of a blunt, in-your-face revelation. The film would've benefitted from using a more subtle method to let us in on the secret of Hailsham.

We move ahead several years in time, and the now adults Kathy, Tommy and Ruth (now played by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, respectively) are sharing living accommodations with a few other people who are meant to suffer the same fate as them. They are all clones whose bodies will gradually be used for purposes of organ donation, which means they will all likely be dead in their 30s. But there may be some hope... there's the possibility of a deferral, if two of these people prove that "they're in love". It doesn't mean their bodies won't still be used; it just means they may be given more time. Of course, Tommy and Ruth are still together, though we certainly don't understand why. The film continues to do nothing to portray the relationship between these two or their feelings for one another. All we get are random moments in which we hear them having sex, while a pouting Kathy listens in the other room, still pining for Tommy after all these years. There's a ridiculous scene that almost feels like it was taken out of another film: Ruth walks into the room to explain to Kathy that "Tommy doesn't see her that way," and the moment feels terribly soap-operatic, with its awful lines of dialogue, and to make it even worse, it concludes with a kiss that makes absolutely no sense nor does it have any relevance to the advancement of the plot.

As the film's predictably melodramatic tearjerker of a denouement looms, we get contrivances galore. Kathy happens to spot a picture of Ruth on a computer. Ruth has a last-minute realization that Kathy and Tommy should instead be together, and Tommy's transition from one woman to the other is handled as if feelings and romantic bonds were passed from one person to another as easily as you may pass someone the salt at the dinner table. It's ludicrous. The ultimate "revelation" about the deferral is insultingly predictable. What makes NEVER LET ME GO even worse is that most of this takes place with a strident violin-based score that is WAY too imposing. It's like the movie is BEGGING us to cry.

Obviously, when a character dies in a film, audience members are aware that an actual death hasn't happened because, well, it's just a movie... so, why is it that sometimes we're emotionally affected when a movie character dies? Because he/she has been developed fully and we've come to care a lot about him/her. Not so in NEVER LET ME GO. The film does a monumental disservice to both Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley by giving them completely underdeveloped characters. We never get to know much about Ruth; the film seems more interested in accentuating Knightley's hard facial features, which don't look good in the least bit (certainly no comparison to how regal and luminous she was in ATONEMENT). Tommy has his moments, but he never comes to the surface either, and this is particularly irritating in light of the work Garfield did in BOY A and THE SOCIAL NETWORK, because we KNOW that the guy could've done something incredible with this character if he'd been given the chance to.

The film's lone strength, and the reason why I'm actually being generous in giving it a 4/10, is definitely Carey Mulligan's wonderfully natural and realistic performance as Kathy. If this film had exploited its potential to be a truly devastating piece of cinema, Mulligan's performance would've elevated NEVER LET ME GO into greatness. She belongs in a different movie. Because of the film's lameness and emotional hollowness, it's impossible for her bravura work to have the effect it deserved to have on us.

It's not too important for me whether or not a film has a message. If it takes an interesting path in saying what it has to say, and in the end, we're not quite sure WHAT it said, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But if a film does decide to deliver a message, the LEAST it can do for the audience is not insult it with something that's beyond trite. I can tell you without really spoiling anything what NEVER LET ME GO's ultimate message is: "Life is fleeting and sometimes we may wonder whether we lived it to the fullest or not." Do you feel enlightened? I didn't. Of course, it didn't help that the message is delivered through the film's cheesy voiceover. While I haven't read the novel it is based on, I'd bet money that a lot of these voiceovers are straight from the novel's text. They feel out of place and they're overly descriptive, thus taking away from the film's authenticity. This film should've been raw and devastating, not schmaltzy and superficial. NEVER LET ME GO is a total waste of a great idea for a plot and of a stellar cast.

The premise was very interesting (and relatively original) and the acting was great. Overall, the movie would have been much improved if we got more insight into what the characters were thinking and feeling. It isn't until the last 30 mins that you really start to get a feel for the characters. A better director might have helped.