The world ends not with a bang but a whimper in Children of Men. Mysterious worldwide infertility has effectively rendered humanity unable to reproduce for 18 years, and by the year 2027, our species has pretty much thrown its hands up in the air and resigned itself to extinction.
Director Alfonso Cuarón and a small army of screenwriters (including Cuarón himself) adapt author P.D. James’ 1993 novel into a cinematic vision of the future that’s as stomach-churning as it is real-feeling. That’s because there’s so little fantasy involved; aside from the female infertility, the styles of automobiles look a little different, computers have gotten thinner and smaller and we’ve found new ways to advertise products, but little else seems to have changed since 2006.
Sure, London is a graffiti-covered, yellow-tinted urban nightmare of barking dogs and bobbies in riot gear, but so many of the images Cuarón gives us are present and past, not future—scenes of a military camp where caged prisoners wear Abu Ghraib hoods and are menaced by German shepherds a la the U.S. terror prisoner scandals, piles of burning animal corpses in the English countryside as per the millennial hoof-and-mouth epidemic, plus refugee camps filled with desperate people reduced to throwing rocks, dreadlocked activists in the streets, religious fanatics with their misspelled signs…about the only comforting distance between the dying world on the screen and the dying world outside the theater is that ours can still make babies. For now.
The sad-sack defeat of 21st century humanity is embodied by the hangdog expression and permanent frown of the heroically cheekbone-d Clive Owen. He plays Theodore, a former radical activist who has transformed himself into an everyman salaryman. He spends his days drinking to numb himself, only perking up slighty in the presence of eccentric pot farmer Jasper (Michael Caine).
That all changes when he’s recruited by terrorists/activists (or is that activists/terrorists?) to help shepherd a young refugee woman out of Britain and into the hands of “The Human Project,” a group of benevolent scientist that may or may not even exist, but which is rumored to be working on solving the whole reproduction problem. Theo and company have at least a little reason to hope, as the woman (Claire-Hope Ashitey) is nine months pregnant—if she survives to deliver the baby, she’ll be the first woman to give birth in 18 years, making her and her unborn child a valuable commodity for whomever can get a hold of her first.
Following the pair on their journey through a first-world country that’s become a third-world country (as for the former third-world, it doesn’t even seem to exist anymore), we get a tour of the Britain of the near future, and it’s pretty scary stuff. Cuarón’s filmmaking is as gripping and intense as his world-building is thoughtful and genuine; there are several scenes of simply unnerving power in this movie, perhaps the most compelling and immediate being Theo’s long, mad dash through an urban war zone, captured by a camera with a blood-splattered lens. Shot in one long, breathless take, and from the perspective of an unarmed non-combatant caught between factions of soldiers, it makes the battle scenes of Black Hawk Down feel like outtakes from the Doom movie.
The term “science fiction” has become something of a dirty word among filmmakers and watchers—in the press notes, Cuarón himself emphatically states that his is not a sci-fi movie, simply a “chase movie” set in the future—because we tend to use it to refer to anything containing robots, spaceships and/or aliens. But Children of Men is science fiction in the truest sense of the term, and with the emphasis on the fiction rather than the science. Even more so than good sci-fi films like Blade Runner or Minority Report, really, because it doesn’t resort to symbolism or analogy as much as much as it does simple extrapolation.
It’s a smart, powerful and depressingly accurate work about the state of the world, and how that state could be even worse. If Cuarón refuses the term “science fiction,” perhaps he’ll settle for “science literature.”
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