Best dystopia movie ever...

Rating: 9/10 (4 January 2008)

This is the best dystopia movie ever. I haven't seen the movie version of 'Nineteen Eighty Four', though the images from this movie seem to jump from the pages of George Orwell's book. That said, seeing images from probably the most graphic and depressing dystopia book ever that you painted only mentally is not a comfort. There were movements in the narrative where I was literally wincing and flinching. To put things in perspective, I was merely shocked while watching horror masterpieces like 'The Shining' and 'The Exorist' (good movies, just a different reaction). As always, I only comment on movies that have a script that drives the movie machine and direction and acting that supports the script (Hitchcock-ian outlook towards movies, I am afraid) and 'Children of Men' is no exception.
As far the basic plot line goes, the world as we know it has been turned over its head. The world has gone to hell in a hand basket, with only Britain managing to show a semblance of order (not necessarily law). It has managed to do so by becoming a police state that is treating citizens as possible terrorists and immigrants as rats carrying plague. The proletariat lives in squalor, filth, poverty and depression. Gone is the problem of over-population and increasing and/or high birth rates and low mortality rates. By 2027, the year the story is set in; entire human population has become sterile and pets are treated like surrogate children. The movie starts with the youngest person in the world, who is 18 and has a rock star popularity, being tragically killed in a senseless brawl.
The protagonist, Theo (Owen), gives the overly sentimental news coverage of this tragedy a baleful look. In fact he reserves this baleful look for all existence. One fine day he is kidnapped (in a world with no kids, the term is ironical) by a terrorist group led by none other than his ex (Moore) and more significantly the mother of his child. The child died twelve years prior and the two find different ways of coping with the pain and go their separate ways. She entrusts him with procuring for her a set of transit papers for a girl, Kee (Ashitey), who is miraculously pregnant and has to be transported to 'The Human Project' off-Britain shore, a supposedly humanistic group and beacon of hope for mankind. The rest of the story deals with how she is transported to 'safety'.
The direction is superb  notice the body language of characters to the bullets flying and grenade explosions. They are scared and cowering away from the violence and at the same time looking for a way out the muck they are in  the human survival instinct. There is a street fighttype of realism to the violence, without it being too graphic either. They have a sense of humor too that no amount of oppression and depression has been able to suppress. If there is any respite in this political atmosphere, it is that the police state is a bully and brute not an intelligent sadist. The government is not the Orwellian Big Brother that has successfully managed to make every pleasurable activity into a sin and is trying to control every aspect of lives of its own citizens. It is merely a fascist government trying to rid of all elements of society they think harmful.
The message of the movie is nuanced. Paranoia has set into the society hence the police state has come in existence in the first place. Where did it start? Who induced itthe classes or the masses? By the time the events depicted in the picture have begun the world is in perpetual and vicious cycle of violence. The movie does not provide reasons why the world went sterile, whether there is any cure, if the 'The Human Project' is real or not, and if it indeed is real is it genuinely benevolent? None of these riddles are really answered and it up to the viewers to make up their minds. The movie was not really about the world going sterile  it was merely a plot device; it is more about how it reacts to adversity  constructively and destructively.
A solid 9/10 and most deservingly in the Top250 IMDb movie list.