An exciting pump of dystopia fiction.

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2007)

A 40-something man named Theo Faron(Clive Owen) is standing inside a coffee shop with a group of people, watching the news of the death of Baby Diego Ricardo, the youngest person in the world. He is 18 years, 6 Months, 28 days, 4 hours and 8 minutes old. Theo ignores the news, takes his coffee and exits the coffeshop. Here, we see London, a gloomy, dark & depressing London. Suddenly, "BOOM!" The coffee shop explodes by a terrorist act.
Welcome to London 2027 AD. Welcome to Children of Men. Here, humans are infertile. No one can give babies anymore. Thanks to global infertility, mankind has lost all hope for the future, because they are unable to inherit their wealth, ideals and goals to future generations since there aren't any.
It's been 18 years since no woman on Earth is able to give birth. Instead of having humans facing extinction like Fidel Castro dying peacefully because of a disease, mankind implodes and fast forward their extinction by causing nuclear wars in Africa, creating nuclear terrorism in New York, Tokyo & Shanghai, making our capital Kuala Lumpur looking like LA in 1992, and more devastation you could think of. The result? Waves of refugees from all over the world moved to the UK. However, since UK has become a totalitarian state, they've created isolationist and anti-refugee policies that has deported them from UK cities and sent them to concentration camps like what we've saw in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz.
As the story progressed, we see Theo being taken hostage by a terrorist group named The Fishes. Led by Theo's ex wife Julian(Julianne Moore), The Fishes wanted Theo to escort an African 'Fugee' named Kee(Claire Hope-Ashitey) out of the UK and straight to a NGO named "The Human Project" which aims to end infertility and restore procreation in humans. But why Kee? Because Kee holds a secret that no one knew: She's pregnant. And what's so special about that? Well, here's the fact: She's the first woman to get pregnant after 18 years of infertility. Now you dig?
Some futuristic films like Blade Runner and The Matrix includes those cool-cyberpunk technology like flying cars, space travel and all that techno-babble, but this film? Not really. Not to say that this film doesn't have any futuristic design. It does. Some of it includes plasma-televisions, digital billboards, and cars where it has HUDs on the car's mirror. But, it still feels like London in our time, because the director Alfonso Cuaron(of Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban fame) says:
"The future n the film is still the same as our present London despite it's digi-billboards and plasma-TVs. That's because that since women became infertile, humans lose hope for the future and since 2016, technology stopped".
What I loved, so very much, is how Cuarón gives lavish attention to the details of this post-apocalyptic world. Instead of trite character exposition or  God forbid  a huge opening text scroll spelling things out for us, details are what tells us of the larger story outside of Kee's flight. Newspaper clippings, headlines on billboards, TV commercials, animal carcasses on fire, little baby trinkets on people's desks these all tell their own story without those pesky spoken words.
It even feels more real than a typical movie, although it doesn't quite launch into reality/documentary style. I particularly loved a moment when Theo is in the woods and the camera pans up to the incredibly tall treetops while the evening gust of wind filled the speakers. It's hard to explain, but few movies bother to connect with us in how we see the world ourselves, and the somewhat-silent moment of majesty in the woods is something I've loved in my life (Cuarón also gave some attention to the trees in HPPOA, if I recall). The violence, when it comes, is shocking and full of immediate danger  this isn't the showy gunfire of most action flicks, but the scary kind that we see on the evening news. Yet even in a dark setting, there's still a bevy of humor and bright touches to make us laugh and smile, and the ultimate tale of hope is one to root for
Children of Men is good if not, a great movie, and I felt the same tingling of excitement that I felt when I saw Star Wars or V for Vendetta for the first time. By the end, I let my breath out and smiled. Terrific.