More of a mystopia really

Rating: 5/10 (2 March 2007)

You certainly have to credit Children of Men with originality. Rooting a dystopian vision in a real life social or political problem is just so passé.
Apparently by 2027 women can't conceive anymore (isn't that always the way). Women have destroyed the world again; when will they ever learn? Civilisation has, predictably, broken down. The world beyond the English Channel has descended into howling, woad-smeared anarchy. Oh, and the government is evil because it doesn't like refugees.
The problem with Children of Men is that it seems to have been assembled backwards. Most dystopias start with a topical problem or issue they want to explore and then build up to an extreme conclusion. Orwell and Bradbury had totalitarianism; Huxley and Burgess had social dislocation; Atwood had chauvinism; Niccol had genetic enhancement. Children of Men, though, appears to have begun with its funky dystopian backcloth and then realised half way through that it didn't actually have anything to say. Thus we have to listen with increasing impatience to all this guff about hating 'fugees (this caused me a momentary confusion: "don't like The Fugees? So what, I mean, who does?")
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a liberal kind of guy; I like immigration (as I discovered the disconcertingly confusing contraction of refugees to mean). But this Salford Poly, bed-sit politics is a bit preposterous in a post-apocalyptic society don't you think? Somehow, I don't think Neil Pye from the Young Ones would have survived the post-infertility thought police holocaust. Just guessing.
What Children of Men does, it does quite well. It develops atmosphere and pace well and there are some good performances (particularly Clive Owen and Michael Caine) to set against the slightly hammy performances of the NUS fish warriors (I'm not kidding). But in the end it is impossible to escape from the infuriating, TV-shaking pointlessness of it all. Fecundity problem? For Pandas, yes. Are we Pandas? Government doesn't want to turn Britain into a hostel for the entire population of the world? How could they not; what would the Guardian say?