Whether you buy its central premise or not, Alfonso Cuarons adaptation of PD James novel is, without doubt, one of the most technically startling pictures of the year. Even viewing it on a DVD screener copy, as I did, the films atmosphere of a world on the brink of total human extinction is both intoxicating and overwhelming.
An excellent Clive Owen is Theo Faron, ex political activist and world-weary everyman in 2027 London, capitol of the last remaining outpost of civilization. For reasons unknown every single human woman on the planet has been infertile since 2009. As Faron himself so succinctly puts it "In fifty years it'll all be over". Children of Men's London makes that of the silly, but similarly totalitarian V for Vendetta look like a holiday camp. Or maybe it's the other way round, depending on how you feel about holiday camps. The government rounds up all foreigners and cages them before they are shipped to the Guatanamo-like Bexhill-on-Sea internment camp. Suicide kits are freely available, martial law reigns and political activists are, seemingly, framed for acts of terrorism in order to discredit them. Faron begins the film completely apolitical but quickly becomes a fugitive when he is charged with protecting, and hiding, a young black girl who is the worlds first pregnant mother in eighteen years.
It's hard to describe the plot without giving away more than one would wish but there are also star turns by Julianne Moore as a member of the 'Fishes', who are determined to secure equal rights for the mass of immigrants entering Britain and Michael Caine as an old pothead who was once a political cartoonist in the Steve Bell mould.
What Cuaron suceeds so brilliantly in doing with Children of Men is creating an utterly believable vision of the End of the World. Unlike most films, where it's all over in a flash, this is the slow death of humankind and it's truly nightmareish. It's interesting that we, as individuals, are essentially selfish creatures and yet if faced with the total extinction of our species it's easy to imagine this kind of resigned apathy taking place. With no generation to replace your own, whats the point in creating anything new? Art, technology, literature would all be a waste of time without anyone to pass them on to.
The film never explains why this calamity has occurred. Indeed, it's unclear whether this is some Divine Retribution for humankinds evil ways or the result of some manmade catastrophe. As with much of the film, the beauty lies in the ability to read it in either a spiritual or purely secular way. Having said that, some of the religious allegory can get a bit much. The morally ambiguous 'Fishes' employ the famous Ichthys logo as their symbol and ,at the risk of giving away a major plot point, the baby is born in a stable-like enviroment, complete with braying horse on the soundtrack and middle-eastern folk crossing themselves and bowing down to mankinds possible saviour.
Yet Cuaron pulls the whole thing together brilliantly. Let's not forget this was the only man who has managed to make a truly entertaining Harry Potter movie, so he's clearly a cinematic miracle-worker himself. Much of the films backstory is told using snippets of dialogue, newspaper clippings and the ubiquitous plasma screens that cover every square inch of central London. Technically, as I stated earlier, the film is simply astouding. A first-act scene inside a moving car employs what appears to be a continuous camera shot from inside the vehicle whilst chaos ensues outside. You really have to see it to fully appreciate how mind-bending it is. The fact that Cuaron also throws a real shock into the scene, plotwise, means that if the movie hasn't hooked you already there's no way he won't have you now. It's a measure of how masterly this scene is that Spielberg did much the same thing, in a much showier way, during a relatively quiet moment in War of the Worlds but with far less impact but, one suspects, considerably more CGI.
Then there's the, already celebrated, last-third tracking shot through a war-torn internment camp. Even now, 48 hours after seeing the film this scene is seared on my brain. I don't want this to turn into a 'Cuaron is better than Spielberg' rant but this sequence, while similar to shots in Saving Private Ryan is much more poweful than anything in that film, and it has one hell of an emotional payoff, too.
But Children of Men is considerably more than the sum of its parts. I've seen some reviews from England (where the film is old news now, having been released back in October) claiming that this isn't an action movie, it isn't a sci-fi movie. Well, actually it's both and it seems totally unashamed to be a genre pic. It is sci-fi, and the most harrowing and convincing vision of the future since Blade Runner (and that's some accomplishemt). It is a thriller, and its thrills are terrifying (is there anything, in the annals of horror film history, more disturbing than an abandoned school?) It is an action flick, and it's the most exciting and hearstopping of the year, by a very large margin. But Children of Men is also a story about the very real world we live in now, what we are doing to ourselves and the way we might be heading. It's a warning, an extremely sobering one. For all it's bleakness, however, I believe the films real message is this: It's not too late for us to change things around, but it may be tomorrow.