falls short of greatness due to its formulaic nature

Rating: 7/10 (27 January 2007)

One of these days, some innovative filmmaker is going to make a movie set in a future where the skies are crystalline blue, governments treat their citizens with decency and respect, and people live in relative harmony with both technology and one another. But until that time we have "Children of Men," yet another dystopian vision of what life might be like in the not-too-distant future - and, as usual, it ain't a pretty picture.
Based on a novel by P.D. James, "Children of Men" takes place in the year 2027, a time in which the world has been thrown into chaos by war and disease, and the entire human race has been infertile for 18 years. Only Merry Olde England has, for some reason, been able to escape the generalized destruction (though not the infertility). In a bid to protect the nation from hostile outside elements, the government has begun to round up all its illegal aliens, locking them into cages and deporting them off the island (when it isn't slaughtering them outright).
The overrated Clive Owens plays a Ministry of Energy bureaucrat who, much against his will, finds himself caught up in a plot to transport a young pregnant woman - the world's first since 2009 - to a place of safety so she can hopefully help to restart the otherwise doomed human race (although one wonders how a single child in the world will effectuate that outcome).
"Children of Men" has much to recommend it. It has a strong sense of time and place, with a look that is just right for its subject matter. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki has drained most of the color out of the picture, and director Alfonso Cuaron has filmed the scenes with a great deal of immediacy and excitement. Cuaron certainly knows how to gin up the suspense and to make us feel like participants in the action.
But the film is less successful at exploring the profound implications of its theme. James has come up with an unusually intriguing premise - just what would life be like if we knew our species was going to be extinct in less than a hundred years - but the film doesn't do anything all that interesting with it. Instead, the movie turns into a surprisingly conventional "chase" movie, with characters running for their lives from hostile parties amid a ceaseless hail of explosions and bullets. Just why is it that dystopian dramas - from "Fahrenheit 451" to "Logan's Run" to "The Island" to "Minority Report" to "The Imposter" to "Paycheck," to name just a handful - all feel the need to adhere to this tired narrative formula? Every so often, the film zeroes in on its theme, yielding, by far and away, its most effective moments: people sobbing uncontrollably as they watch a news story relating the sudden death of the world's youngest person; an art collector amassing many of the world's greatest sculptures and paintings even though he knows that in less that a hundred years there will be nobody left to appreciate them; a former midwife, sitting in an abandoned schoolroom, recounting with soul-wrenching sadness the day she realized children would no longer be gracing the world with their presence; combatants momentarily stopping their gunfire to stare awestricken at a newborn babe. We yearn for more of these psychologically astute and insightful moments, but, alas, this is not to be, as Cuaron and his team of writers pour on the action scenes pretty much at the expense of everything else.
Owens, Michael Caine (in the annoyingly stereotypical role of an aging eccentric hippie) and Julianne Moore are the "name" players in the cast, but the most powerful performances come from Claire-Hope Ashitey as the pregnant woman and Pam Ferris as the person assigned to be her midwife.
"Children of Men" is a good film that could have been a great one were it not redolent of so many likeminded movies that have come before it.