An inconveniently truthful masterpiece that'll grow in significance with time...

Rating: 10/10 (23 September 2016)

Eschatological fears are pillars of religious beliefs and our time isn't the most likely to appease them. Even on a personal level, if the future could be revealed, I'm not sure there'd be many candidates for curiosity. This is why dystopian sci-fi movies are essential, they force us to face the more inconveniently truthful situations.
And we seem to be on the right track for a scenario à la "Children of Men", minus the infertility plot. I'm not too far from Calais, the terminal of thousands of refugees fleeing the Syrian War, after a long journey that started in Turkey. But England shut its frontier so that no refugee could ever reach the British Fortress, and I bet the issue weighted a lot on the Brexit vote. And Calais, ever since, become known as the 'Jungle' a lawless place, with more opportunistic than Syrian immigrants.
These refugees are the pawns of a system beyond us all, the fall-outs of wars lead in the Middle East that destroyed despotic yet stable regimes like Libya, Iraq and now Syria, and whose tiny fanatic or terrorist minority might cause the wars of tomorrow. While not caged, the refugees are stacked like cattle and live in horrendous conditions but so are Calais' inhabitants and shopkeepers. And while left-wings group support the refugees in the name of humanity, right- wings groups support the population in the name of 'common sense'. Now, where would you side?
The same goes in "Children of Men", where everyone has reasons to fight as the harm is done anyway, and if the film was dystopian in 2006, one decade later, it feels disturbingly realistic. I'm of a Muslim background and there was a scene where Muslim refugees, carrying a corpse, were marching over London, shouting 'Allah Akbar". For some reason, I thought it was a pretty realistic portrait of the way things could evolve, and maybe I can empathize with European people who'd rather preserve their lifestyle. But they should put the blame on their former leaders and their mistakes of devastating proportions, if anything the world owe them the frontier-less mess it has become.
But if "Children of Men" was only about that 'mess' I'm not sure it would have garnered the same critical acclaim. Indeed, a dystopian film better has an interesting story to tell to cancel out the depressing stuff. And it does, "Children of Men" starts in 2027 with the death of Baby Diego, the youngest person on Earth, age 18. Cuaron doesn't care for exposition, we get straight to the point that there's a huge epidemic of infertility and the human species is bound for extinction. We don't need to know why and how this happened. This is a magnificent example of a MacGuffin that doesn't raised more questions than needed, that the whole world but Britain is under chaos seems plausible.
"Children of Men", adapted from P.D. Jones' novel, tackles a subject that is central to Science Fiction, the survival of human specie. And now, Earth is stricken by a disease condemning humanity, it turns out to be every man for himself. One can die if he knows he lets family behind him, but that his memory won't survive to the world is something beyond acceptation, it's like dying forever, it's the deathblow on the only thing that could make men feel immortal. And with this simple premise, "Children of Men" exposes us to our human condition, asking a simple question "now, with all that context in mind, would you die for the only woman who can give birth to a child?".
In the film, soldiers fight for order, Fishes, a clandestine group fights for the rights of the refugees; but there are also people dying for Kee (Clare Hope-Ashitey) the only woman who miraculous survived the epidemic. Again, the MacGuffin works, we don't need to know why she's spared, there's no time for that, the mission is to allow her to deliver in safety and make her case help to find a remedy to the disease. At first, she's introduced to Theo Caron (Clive Owen) by his former girlfriend and co-activist Julian (Julianne Moore), another Fishes' member Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is assigned to drive Kee and her midwife and watchdog Miriam (Pam Ferris) to the safest place but Theo has to come with them as the deliverer of letters of transit. By the time, he figures out the real motives of some members, the situation gets trickier.
Theo (Clive Owen) starts as the cynical every-man, with an office work and a pot-smoking friend played by a scene-stealing Michael Caine, he thinks his life is meaningless but then he understands that it doesn't amount to a hill of beans to the more meaningful life of Kee and her baby to born. Kee is the resurrection of hope, fittingly a woman of African descent as to remind us where we come from, and the first source of genuine smiles and laughs in a film that is rather bleak and depressing, but how would you expect a children-less world to be? In a way, the infertility cure might be the metaphor for the way we're compromising our future through our actions.
Although I'm tempted to get philosophical, I'd like to end the review in a more simplistic term; "Children of Men" is a great film in the Howard Hawks' meaning of the word: three good scenes and no bad scenes. There are absolutely no bad scene and they're three amazingly single-shot action sequences (all in long takes) in the opening, the middle and naturally the climax of the film, who uses the crowd in a documentary-like realism that immediately made me think of "Battle of Algiers", released 40 years earlier.
I wouldn't be surprised if Cuaron's masterpiece reached a similar status in 2046 and maybe less surprised if the world looked like 2027 as the film gains in significance as time goes by.