NEVER LET ME GO
Director : Mark Romanek
Screenplay : Alex Garland
Based on : Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Music : Rachel Portman
Camera : Adam Kimmel
Running time: 103 minutes
Language : English
What exactly does it mean to be human? This question could not be more applicable to today's time. In America we are constantly debating the ethical implications of difficult issues such as abortion, stem-cell use and cloning.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro deals with the last of these controversial subjects — cloning. The story is told through the eyes of Kathy H, a 31-year-old woman who is reminiscing on her days as a student at a boarding school in modern-day England called Hailsham.
Kathy's story is shrouded in mystery as she tells about her earlier life at Hailsham spent with her friends, Ruth and Tommy. The students at Hailsham experience life in a relatively normal fashion, playing sports, gossiping and developing crushes on boys, but they are constantly reminded of the fact that they are “special.”
After Kathy and her friends leave Hailsham, they embark on a life that is without the security and constraints of the boarding school, and they struggle to come to terms with their purpose in life as “donors,” human beings who are brought into the world for the sole purpose of donating their organs.
Kathy eventually becomes a “carer,” which is someone whose sole job is to take care of the “donors,” and leaves her friends. After several years, she reunites with Tommy and becomes his carer, and they set out together to find answers to all of the mysteries surrounding the existence of Hailsham and themselves.
Never Let Me Go is an absorbing, thoughtful and profoundly sad book that poses a lot of questions concerning the nature of human worth. One of the characters in the book that attempts to rally for the civil rights of clones poignantly describes the lot of Kathy and those like her by saying, “For a long time, you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn't matter.”
Though a fictional character in a fictional book said this, it can be easily applied to a number of modern issues (immigration, abortion, sex-trafficking and even cloning). This makes Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go incredibly relevant to life in the 21st Century and well worth reading.
Review Courtesy: Janna Gentry, English junior
Link : http://www.oudaily.com/news/2010/dec/09/book-review-never-let-me-go-highlights-issues-rele/
Details : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(2010_film, http://www.foxsearchlight.com/neverletmego/
No comments:
Post a Comment