Beautiful film about our ugly world

Rating: 10/10 (24 January 2007)

With Children of Men Alfonso Cuar贸n continues his skill at making films that are beautiful to watch, layered with political commentary, and leave the audience with enough ambiguity to interpret the film for themselves.
The backdrop is a not-too-distant future where problems like war and ecological destruction have reached a breaking point causing both mass migration and infertility. A single woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), becomes pregnant and must navigate through an oppressive nationalist England as well as revolutionary groups concerned only with their own agendas. Kee gets help from the jaded alcoholic Theo (Clive Owen) on their way to a secret project that aims to undo infertility.
The film is beautifully dark with each set packed full of information about this strangely familiar world. There are piles of burning cattle carcasses, ever-present advertisements for drugs, and immigrants being rounded up and hooded. Long "single-shot" action sequences that incorporated digital splicing help move the story along. Cuar贸n straps us into each car chase scene making them feel almost like amusement rides. In Y Tu Mama Tambien, Cuar贸n used an erotic teen adventure to tell the tale of contemporary politics in Mexico. In Children of Men, he uses the escape plot line to tell the story of an issue that is hardly action-oriented: infertility.
Children of Men refuses to give us any simple answers. The government labels a sympathetic Julian (Julianne Moore) as England's number one terrorist. The revolutionary group "The Fishes" cannot be trusted. There is no named cause for the mass infertility. There is no single cause for the global collapse that seems to have happened outside of England. The ending is ambiguous. Theo comments early in the film that he is not sure how much new babies would help since the world was already a messed up place. In our contemporary world we have wars, authoritarian governments, climate change, collapsed fisheries, refugee crises, toxic pollution, infertility, disease and water shortages, any or all of which can lead to the world of Children of Men. There is also a quiet acceptance in our modern society that we have crossed a threshold that we can never return through. We might not get a happy ending. Children of Men unnervingly represents this lack of hope.
When Kee is in the barn, she makes an aside about how the "cut the titties" of dairy cows because the machines can only fit 4 nipples. Only in a world based on masculine values would such a barbaric act be perpetrated in the name of production. Ultimately, we are all children of men and world we have created is the child of men. We have been raised to value violence, material production, authority and ecological destruction. Issues like fertility and compassion for our fellow humans fall to the wayside to oil wars and deporting immigrants. The children of men very well may spend their dying days oppressing immigrants and pointing guns as they march violently into the hell of their own creation.
If this interpretation is true, this would make Children of Men the only contemporary ecofeminist film to my knowledge. In the end we are left to wonder, "If children of men have destroyed this world, can the children of women heal it?"