The End of Times: In Children of Men, humanity confronts with its slow and absolute extinction

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2006)

The most elegant and studious British crime authors, P.D. James, 86 years-old, is also the one that knows best the subject which she writes about: married to a doctor that came back schizophrenic from World War II, she felt obliged to become the supplier of the family by initiating a career as public server that would culminate, in the 70's, with a high post in the criminal division of the Interior Ministery - from which got her to deal with criminal authorities from all over the country, and to recruit criminal pathologists for the British forense medicine labs. It was one hell of an experience, and P.D. James made use of it not only in elaborated (and pessimists) thriller books but also in a story which, at first glance, is a strange body in her curriculum - the science fiction Children of Men, where the human race is predestined to disappear not in a sudden way, due to a cataclysm, but little by little, because of an eruption of infertility that has been going for years. With the romance, the writer puts in focus a commonly peripheral question of all apocalyptic fiction: how men and women would behave in the day-by-day, and what moral choices they would make, if they knew that there is nobody left to inherit their world? That is also the idea that Mexican film maker Alfonso Cuarón keeps firmly centralized in his adaptation of the book to the big screen.
Before anything else, it is necessary to say that the brazillian title inverts the meaning of the path the film walks on. (I say brazillian title because that's where i came from, and where i watched the movie as well) It takes place in 2027, and since 2009 there isn't a registration of any birth on the planet. The youngest human being just has been murdered for refusing to sign an autograph - and the last ones that were born are treated like gods and act like "assholes", according to the definition of the bureaucrat Theodore Falon (Clive Owen). Faron lives in England, one of the few countries that still resist in some way. The rest has already turned into vinegar, and the British borders live pursued by multitudes of immigrants. When these swell, the more grows the number of policemen and the control of the State. What the movie of Cuarón transmits better is the futility of these efforts. Without a biological tomorrow, there isn't a way and neither a why to contain the material and spiritual disintegration. Here it is, then, the paradox that treats on both book and movie: it is the most primitive of all impulses - of the continuity of the specie - that lies the reason for all civilization. There goes as well the title, which paraphrases the 90th psalm: "And the Lord said: 'Come back sons of Adam, to the dust which you left'" (something like that). Against all his beliefs (or lack of them), however, the bureaucrat Faron gets involved with a rogue group that located something that no one imagined possible - a pregnant woman. It is a miracle so huge as any other in the Scriptures. But this new Eve, black and illegal immigrant, is a political triumph for anyone that puts their hand on her. Despite the notable nimbleness of Cuarón (also known for And Your Mother Too and the third Harry Potter) as a narrator and visual creator, Children of Men imposes a first obstacle to the viewer: it is necessary to buy its premise in one go. Surpassed this barrier, it becomes one of the most intriguing movies, that doesn't get tired of exploring an unsolved dilemma: there is nothing that the human being isn't capable of corrupting, and nothing that he isn't capable of saving as well.