"And a child shall be born unto them."

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2007)

If you like futuristic apocalyptical themes, you'll like this. If you're like me, and don't find them appealing, then you might like watching the vision of the Director spread out on screen.
We've been here before. It is a genre that always seems to be played out in dark, violent, frightening, hues of man reduced to a barely civilized mass of humanity. Something has gone awry and we are left to wonder what. Immigrants seem to be the main problem. Thousands of them rounded up in cages and shipped to holding camps on the coast.
Clive Owen, our anti hero lower echelon bureaucrat, walks in a London reduced to something from "1984" or "Blade Runner." The government has turned fascist (1984), and the big new of the day is that the youngest man on Earth has died at 18. The planet is not reproducing! Then his ex- wife shows up with a request for papers to allow a woman immigrant she knows passage out this hell of a U.K. He reluctantly agrees and soon enough finds himself as the sole protector of the only pregnant woman on Earth. Due to her value to any and all factions the only safe place for her is something called the "project." The plot line has a million ways to develop but the Director and writers choose to go the old route of a tour through a Breugelian circles of hell. It's all well done but the theme is regurgitated and old. It seemed like Clive was walking through set pieces in a human zoo, a flotsam and jetsam of humanity waiting it's demise. The message is clear: Shape up Earth or this awaits you.
My problem with anything futuristic lies in my need for people to behave realistically within that future, and that just doesn't come across here. Within the plot the people come across as actors cued to act and react. In the end the biggest probability of all lies unanswered.
In reality the real gold mine is the woman, not the child. The child is the future, the woman is the producer of it. As the only fecund female on Earth she'd be doomed to become a fertility cow, a Queen Bee of the future, popping out little future-lings for an incestuous rebirth!