Never Let Me Go Review

Never Let Me Go is a film directed by Mark Romanek and based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Alex Garland the British novelist who wrote the book The Beach.
It is a good but depressing film that makes you think about life and the human desire to live as long as possible.

The film follows the lives of three donors, played by Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, who are basically clones.  The focus of the film is on their relationships with each other – a love triangle – as they grow up together and later, how they cope as donors.

As donors they are perceived as soulless and purely potential body parts for an ever increasing older population and their only respite from being put through surgery after surgery donating their organs is to become a carer first.

The carer’s job is to look after a donor until they die, usually after undergoing surgery.  The clones are seen as not ‘human’ by those who know of them.
The three main characters discover the secret behind their existence at a special school for donors. Though the secret that the children are donors may have been a secret to the children; it seems that the society they lived in had got used to or accepted the fact that these clone children existed for the sole benefit of others. And even if those in society didn’t like the idea, it was obvious from the film that there wasn’t much they could do about it.

It was hard to see the positive from the film but there was; that it doesn’t matter how long you live and what defined you while you lived, the most important things are love, friendship and hope. I think. I found it hard to keep a grasp of that tiny hint of positivity though.
Is it better if the body parts were incubated in a tube? Is it better that they don’t have a a name or is from a whole human body? Is it better that what donors are at the moment, anonymous and just a body part, and most importantly, consensual?
Ironically, the word donor suggests a transaction that is consensual; dictionary.com defines it as ‘to present as a gift’. But the donors in the film are not donors but more like human cattle – to be reared, to used and to be disposed of and there is  nothing consensual about it.

Why didn’t the donors try to escape like those in The Island (another film about cloning)? Was the system so ingrained in them that it was a conditioned response? The boundaries from clone closure and the real world didn’t seem strong enough. Couldn’t they just ‘disappear’?
It would be interesting to read the book – something on my to-do list.