What a horribly dark future Alphonso Cuaron envisions!

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2007)

Children of Men is a post-apocalyptic vision of a world gone mad. The year 2027 finds all of the women on the planet made sterile. Entire countries collapse, and Britain becomes a shell-shocked land ravaged by racism, police brutality, and death squads.
Enter reluctant hero Clive Owen (who's brilliant in pretty durn near everything he does, "Children of Men" included). He is recruited by former lover Julianne Moore (slightly less believable as the rebel leader) to save the life of a "fugie" (short for 'fugitive') who, miraculously, is pregnant. He needs to escort the young woman to meet up with the Human Project, a Amnesty International-like organization who rescues such people from the clutches of the government.
This is a very dark movie. It's not directly violent, at least not to an extreme extent, but there are such subtexts, subtle and not, that are really reflecting a dark interpretation of our own world and the people who inhabit it (like all good speculative fiction stories should). We are shown a world where apathy and hatred are joined hand-in-hand, creating a world so terribly depressing it just oozes sadness from the screen. We are looking at a society without hope, and without hope, there is nothing but pain, torture, and death (handed out by the government in convenient carry cases of suicide pills).
The film does have many exciting action scenes, including a terrific scene of an ambush. I won't spoil the scene, but Cuaron practically invents a new method of shooting an action scene from the viewpoint of the passengers in a car. It's quite spectacular, and worth the price of admission alone. There are some other great action scenes, filmed not head-on (as Spielberg would have done), but as sidebars (Cuaron focuses on the hero's drive to find the pregnant girl, and simply wraps those character-driven scenes amongst great battle sequences).
The one and only reason I am giving this a 9 instead of a 10 is pacing in the early part of the film. I gauge a film's pacing by how often I look at my watch, and in the first half of this film I was so bored I took many glances (and even risked nodding off at one point). I think the director spent too much time developing the hero and his pot-smoking mentor (played cleverly by the great Michael Caine). The film could have used some tightening right there.
Otherwise, this is a great film.
9 out of 10 Barky