A dark and doom-laden affair

Rating: 8/10 (16 December 2007)

Apocalyptic films and literature have run the gamut form monsters and fascists to aliens with most stories featuring narratives in which mankind is either enslaved, impotent, or on the verge of extinction. Nowhere do we see the human race being transformed into higher, more evolved spiritual beings. In Children of Men, last year's excursion into futuristic gloomsville, Lou Dobbs' worst nightmares have come true. Only Britain seems to have survived some sort of holocaust and immigrants (called 'fugees) from all over the world have descended upon its gleaming shores. Why the Brits are the chosen people is not explained. All we know is that the 'fugees have flooded the country and are suspected of terrorism and restricted by martial law. Rounded up and arrested, they are put in holding pens near the seacoast and are treated as less than fully human.
Set in 2027, Children of Men depicts the chaos and confusion of a world on the brink of madness. Based on a 1992 novel by P.D. James, mankind has lost the ability to procreate while scientists in the Human Project work to reverse the loss the last child born on Earth, now 18 years old. The government is a police state beset by terrorists such as the Fish who are fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants and working to throw out the hated government. The streets are littered with garbage and people live in rubble and bombed out buildings that look like Dresden after the fire bombing. Old people are given Quietus programs to assist them in committing suicide. In this scene of atmospheric darkness there is a glimmer of hope. A former radical Theo Fearon (Clive Owen) has given up the fight, content to do his job as a worker in the Ministry of Energy and consort with an old pot-smoker Jasper (Michael Caine).
Jasper lives in the woods and mouths inanities such as the world is a battle between faith and chance (without any purpose I presume). When Theo is detained by former radical Fish associates led by his ex-lover Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), he is drawn back into the conflict once again. Asked to provide transit documents to ensure safe passage out of the country for a young 'fugee named Kee (Claire Hope-Ashitey), Theo finds out that the girl is miraculously pregnant and mankind's last hope. As the two fight off the police and the terrorists to reach a ship operating as the Human Project, seen as the last sanctuary left on Earth, the film takes us on a wild ride through many taut battle sequences and Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron does an amazing job of keeping us involved in a thrilling ride in which the survival of the human race is at stake.
Although Cuaron has said, "I believe an evolution is happening, an evolution of the human understanding that is happening in the youngest generation. I believe that the generation to come is the one that is going to come with new schemes and new perspectives of things", Children of Men is mostly a dark and doom-laden affair in which mankind seems not to have made any spiritual progress in the last twenty years. There is no beauty. There is no transformation. Devoid of the new perspective Cuaron talks about, Children of Men describes a physical and spiritual dead end.