An amazing vision of the future

Rating: 9/10 (9 May 2007)

Every so often, one sees a film that affirms everything they believe in, or changes the way they see the world. Children Of Men is a little of both, not least because it constructs the world in which it takes place with meticulous attention to detail. Based on a story describing one of our greatest nightmares, Children Of Men can even be loosely interpreted as a metaphor for how we would respond to living in a world where we perceive everyone around us as taking for granted what we consider an impossible dream. Set in a somewhat distant future, Children Of Men tells the story of an England that is part of a world where infertility has become the one universal trait for every woman in the world. Through a number of visual cues, we are informed that infertility rates started to accelerate until around the year 2009, no woman will conceive or carry a child to term for another eighteen years. The result is a society in which youth is so highly prized that it can bring instant fame to those in possession of it.
The story begins with the news that the youngest known citizen of the world has been killed. As tragic as this news seems, things are about to get even worse for Theo, a rare good performance from Clive Owen. Theo is a former activist working at a government bureau who finds himself being suddenly abducted by still-active activists, led by Julian, an even rarer good performance from Julianne Moore. So far as Theo knows at the beginning, Julian is simply asking him to help escort a woman to safe haven. But after the first stage of the trip goes haywire due to the intervention of one political faction, Theo is shown the Earth-shattering truth by the woman he is escorting. Not only is this the first woman to have conceived a child in around eighteen years, she is also the first who looks like she might actually deliver. Never mind that she looks all of fifteen years old, as they say, this event is so highly amazing, it is a credit to the filmmakers that they can make something so mundane seem like the second coming.
During the first seventy minutes of the film, the world our characters inhabit is so well-realised that we accept its reality within ten minutes. Suspending disbelief is a lot like teaching someone to swim. You either do it in slow, graduating steps, or you throw the person in and hope they float. The latter approach is the riskier of the two, but it can be done if the right set design or props are in place. Both of these things and more are present in Children Of Men, and I was frequently left wondering where all of the seemingly abandoned locations were found. During the 1980s, films that depicted a bleak future with the world on the verge of collapse, or already in the throes of collapse, were becoming a flood on the market. None came so close to selling the illusion that they were live photography of what they were depicting as is the case in Children Of Men. This is as close as a film in the English language has ever come to depicting a world after its end, or is ever likely to.
Alas, the film is not entirely perfect. The last twenty minutes in particular degenerate into a repetitive action scenario, with the final struggle to get Kee and her newborn child to the promised land in particular letting the side down. It almost feels as if the writers got to the final act and decided that getting the child out to sea without a mass gunfight was just not climactic enough. Also letting the side down is the photography. While there is no deliberate shaky-cam, overuse of the wrong camera technique can lessen the impact of what one sees. Sleepers, for instance, suffered badly from the constant steadicam work, and Children Of Men falls victim to the simple fact that there is just too much hand-held. I fully expect people to defend this decision by claiming it puts the viewer into the action. The meticulous set design and storytelling did that for me already. What the wobbly camera does is give me the feeling that I am watching a drunk uncle's home video. And trust me on this, my uncles' lives are not that interesting.
Speaking of the photography, most of the film is shot in long, continuous takes. Unlike the hand-held, this artistic decision pays off in spades, giving the effect that the hand-held, and the shaky-cam in other films, fails to. The initial sequence in the car when we are introduced to Kee is a continuous twelve-minute take that must be seen to be believed. Speaking of things that must be seen to be believed, the moment when the soldiers stop firing to watch as the baby is brought past them is one of the most mesmerising shots out of all the two dozen films I have seen this past fortnight. They went to enormous trouble to accomplish what was intended in this film, and the end result has made it worth every penny. The hand-held camera and final action sequence aside, Children Of Men is one of those happy accidents of film-making where all of the elements come together exactly at the right time. It always strikes me as ironic that the most affirming and encouraging films or stories often come from their creators being willing to face up to the darkness in all of us.
Children Of Men is a flawed masterpiece denied perfection only by a few ill-advised artistic decisions. A nine out of ten film.