A strong statement, but not the one you think...

Rating: 7/10 (5 April 2008)

Much has been said about Children of Men's statement regarding the debate on immigration. From what the professional critics have said, the movie is a resounding condemnation of the anti-immigration mindset. I saw something very different.
For the sake of simplicity, let's take the Fishes, a paramilitary group fighting the British gov't in an effort to give immigrants equal rights with citizens. So the world is in economic collapse and everyone on the planet is trying to get into England. Why? Because they know that in England is order, security, and prosperity, which are the dividends of White Western nations. The Fishes, like today's open-borderites, want to let everyone in who wants in. The only problem is that prosperity does not reside in the soil of the West, nor is it in the air, nor in the water. It resides in the people. Since immigrants do not leave their culture at the door, but rather bring it with them, they would in very short order make England look exactly like the cesspools they'd fled from. So the net result would be the very same refugees with nowhere else to flee, after the annihilation of a sovereign country.
Children's England is a reaction to this, the reaction of a country brought very close to destruction. Viewed in this light, what is remarkable is not the brutality of the regime but the restraint of it. Refugees are deported, not summarily executed. They are not hidden but are kept outside where all can see them, probably to remind the Britons just how close the end was. The people in the refugee camps are obviously well fed, otherwise there wouldn't be any dogs (and certainly not a horse, of all things). Christian soldiers stop firing and kneel in reverence when a woman and child walk by (some fascists!). And the chanting during the uprising of "Allahu Akbar!", far from engendering sympathy, reminds us yet again that Moslems are at war with the entire planet, and the settling of a significant number of them in any non-Moslem country is planting the seed of destruction, whether through active jihad or demographic shift. In the end Children did not show an evil and xenophobic regime, but rather open-borders taken to its logical conclusion.
Add to this spectacular single-shot scenes, and perhaps the finest depiction of urban combat yet created, and you have a movie well worth seeing. If the story line had been at all engaging, I would have rated it as a 9, but as it is I didn't care a bit about any of the characters or whether the baby survived or not. The anti-immigration statement was enough for me.