The Handmaid's Tale (1990)
Rayting:
6.0/
10 8.8K votes
Language: English
Release date: 15 February 1990
In a dystopian, polluted right wing religious tyranny, a young woman is put in sexual slavery on account of her now rare fertility.
Similar Movies
5.9
Crimes of the Future 2022
5.9
The In Between 2022
6.6
After Yang 2022
4.6
Firestarter 2022
6.6
Memoria 2021
5.8
Encounter 2021
6.8
Swan Song 2021
4.8
Mother/Android 2021
User Reviews
The Handmaid's Tale goes a long way to show just what could possibly happen if some religious establishment were to take control of the government. In the movie you can plainly see the horrific amount of mysoginy and mistreatment of women that was commonplace in times past and is prevalant in many societies today. I think that the overall concept of the movie is good, but I think that the presentation of it could have been better. The characters seemed to lack depth and like other comments I have read, the directing was horrible. I can understand that there must have been some difficulty in adapting Atwood's book to movie format since the original story is solely from the viewpoint of Offred (the handmaid). I can certainly see that the screenwriters tried to stick to one of Atwood's main points in the story of the mysoginy and facism of the group that had taken control. The movie shows the wisdom of keeping a strict separation of church and state.
Fmovies: Such a completely alien world, I was shocked and intrigued and disgusted and weirded out and engaged all at the same time. Very odd, but really great quality for the era (89).
I couldn't bring myself to even make a cup of tea for fear of missing something, so I guess it kept me on edge and really interested the whole time. Opening sequences grabbed me, made me instantly curious, and Aidan Quinn's name, well, that had me anyway.
Recommend that people watch this, especially if they appreciate slightly odd, artistic films.. as this is, but on a large scale.
Weird. Loved it.
This movie is about what can happen when religious nuts take over the country's government. People who are different are either killed or enslaved in one way or another. Let's see...we have murder and public display of anyone who isn't of the religion that took over....women who are fertile enslaved for religious higher-up's in the government...anyone who's different, and ISN'T killed enslaved in radioactive areas...makes you realize why people fight so hard against religion intruding into politics. Like the scholars from the future of this story who have a hard time believing it actually happened, despite hearing the story with their own ears, people nowadays don't believe that "people of God" in government would be so bad. Watch this movie and think on it. This is why there's a separation of church and state.
The Handmaid's Tale fmovies. This movie, based on Margaret Atwood's story, concerns a woman living in the not too distant future in the Republic of Gilead, a country that was once the United States. The country is now run by fundamentalist Christians who have demoted all women to a second class citizenship. Nuclear war has made most women infertile, so the government has forced all the fertile women to serve as handmaids and bear children for the leaders and their infertile wives as part of a biblical prophecy. The infertile women are sent off to toil as slaves and clean up nuclear waste. This movie concerns one handmaid, Offred (Kate) and her struggle to escape Gilead, find her daughter, and flee to Canada. Not a bad movie at all, all the actors do very well. The material just runs very slow at points, and the character's aren't all that well developed.
For those who think this might be far-fetched I refer to the Christian and very influential theologian, St Augustine of Hippo, who thought sex was disgusting (and he had had quite a bit of it) and only redeemed by its procreative aspect. This ably demonstrates that reducing sex to that function is debased, and totally wrong. Yet sanctions on contraception are still widely upheld. Figure out the implications of that. The series ably illustrates the ridiculous and artificial restrictions on female behavior: women are overly delicate in speech and gesture but when violence is mandated they are expected to, and do, comply. And even for unbelievers, quaint, pious expressions are so successfully inculcated they can't resist mouthing them even when unobserved. It reminded me suddenly of Joan of Arc who saved France as a separate country, but simply had to die, because, what do you do with a talented, heroic female soldier whose existence undermines the male biases of the whole system? This movie is not merely futuristic but a kind of parodic reflection of the status and lives of most women in this so-called civilized world. Traditional religion has not been the only negative factor, but it certainly hasn't helped much.
To whomever it is that wrote the comment that this is an excellent film portraying an alternative form of adoption, you've totally missed the boat. This film is about class warfare and sexual slavery. It is about the degradation of humanity and the rich over the hungry and weak. If this is one of your favorite films, you like it for all the wrong reasons.