Never Let Me Go is too docile, as if any encompassing statement about humanity can be made without including our instinctual sense of survival and treating human passion as it is limited to sexual feelings. Where this film indulges in itself could be forgiven if it were used to unveil new layers subverted in the material. Early on when Hailsham has ‘sales’, the feeling of dread and joy that comes when the child ‘donors and carers’ pick over trash like it was treasure is the perfect example of what this film had going for it and lost. The novel itself is filled with these moments. Whereas Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Trainspotting succeed as two separate but equal parts of something creatively amazing, the shame of Never Let Me Go (both the film and novel) is that each highlight moments of what the other is missing while not capturing the heart of either.
The imposed lack of emotion in the film is made topsy-turvy by its random bursts, as if noise out of silence alone is enough to convey a great weighted struggle. Delicately, it makes Inception look like Taxi Driver. Never Let Me Go the film opened with such strength and ambition, as if this were one of those rare Requiem for a Dream or Shawshank Redemptions’s where a talented director saw through to the heart of the novel beyond even the author’s intention; the first act sputtered on quite forgivably, the second act never lost light of its promise until the climax arrived and pushed the film below the standards it had set.
In a pensive, navel gazing film filled with long beautiful shots and telling close-ups of the very talented actors, the film comes to a head when the woman who collected the student’s art has the old headmaster wheeled out from behind a partition! Andrew Garfield’s one shinning that could have turned the film around was squashed when the headmistress appears like a James Bond to deliver the film’s umpteenth helping of overkill in its obviousness.
Never Let Me Go falls into league with films like The Virgin Suicides, Boondock Saints, Zombieland, and Sunshine (also scripted by NLMG’s Alex Garland) in their ‘almost there’ kind of storytelling and filmmaking, where ambiguous intention is mistakenly rewarded as insight and craft.
Ghetto me says, “The first half of this movie wants to be Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I ain’t even seen dat shit yet!”
Justin Scro 
well said… both pat and i had hopes for this film and it had a great premise going for it, but we left the theatre after seeing it whole unsatisfied.
I could read a book about this wiuhtot finding such real-world approaches!
oops… it’s been a long day. meant to write “wholly” unsatisfied. 😉
Nice review, Justin. The think what bothers me about both the book and the film is that none of the kids ever says, “I don’t think so,” and tries to escape their fate. It seems to me that the writer wrote characters who have more of a Japanese sense of duty than do western kids. British kids certainly wouldn’t take this fate lying down. The characters are all so passive. That passivity could have well been bred into them, but that’s never stated. Still, the book had a haunting quality about it that the film lacks. (Thanks for following me on twitter, too. 🙂 Sally