The movie is one thing; P.D. James's book another

Rating: 7/10 (1 June 2016)

"Children of Men" is a very well done movie based on the essential premise of P.D. James's book of the same name, and I have nothing to add to its many glowing reviews here, though there is perhaps a bit to subtract. Although the author is said to have thought well of the movie, the only thing it has in common with the book is its premise: a world some 20 years in the future in which no children have been born for some 18 years since - which changes everything, in ways that provoke the speculative imagination.
However, the director and chief writer of this film, Alfonso Cuarón, has reduced James's character-driven exploration of civilization's slipping hold on humanity to a conventional English dystopian action adventure story, punctuated with a few touching human dramatic moments, but hardly differentiated from the similarly denatured film version of Orwell's political philosophical book, "1984". James was one of our best (and maybe last) novelists of moral sensibility, whose great strength was her ability to create full-fledged modern characters with all their complexities and contradictions, yet not one of her characters is to be found in the film: only their names have (rather inexplicably) survived the transition.
Missing also is James's trenchant and balanced dramatization of the moral dilemmas of governing a degenerating society, or simply of surviving morally intact in such a society. And there is nothing dystopian, because nothing imaginary, about the social decadence that James was writing about. The soon to occur infertility pandemic that forms the premise of both book and movie, but which is exploited in the movie merely to create poignant human mini-dramas, is in the book essentially a metaphor for the state of modern civilization. Consequently, the book, which I think is one of James's best, owes as much to Swift as to Orwell.
The movie is exciting in places, and moving in others. The book, however, may have much to teach you about human character, and I guarantee that it will make you think.