Armageddon . . . again

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2006)

Imagine a few years from now, and the 'war on terror' has engulfed the whole world with Britain (haha!) as the last refuge from attacks. The economy is in tatters - possibly to pay for the almost omnipresent Homeland Security - but the really bad news is that the human race has become infertile years ago. Pregnant black woman, Kee, appears to Save the Day.
Children of Men is a powerfully devised (if heavily flawed) movie. It uses a mish-mash of modern day fears, realistically projected 20yrs into the future, and a welter of populist, barely disguised religious metaphor to help audiences to identify with its miracle baby and mythical promised land themes.
In 2027 the youngest person is only eighteen years old, and is killed after being asked for an autograph. Clive Owen (who is in every scene) is a disillusioned bureaucrat separated from his long-term partner Julianne Moore who now works for one of a number of resistance groups. She arranges his capture so he can help deliver Kee and her unborn baby to safety.
The scenes of London mix familiarity with desolation, Homeland Security rounding up illegal immigrants into cages and shipping them through a Guantanamo-style holding centre to Bexhill, which has been turned into an enormous refugee camp. Bexhill itself looks more like war-torn Iraq, with various factions, some of them good and many of them not so good, vying for power.
Owen gives a tolerably good performance even if the character looks and sounds like most of his previous roles. Moore, on the other hand, breaks away from her excellent screen personas where she expresses much without words and action, and throws herself into an excellent butt-kicking female militant character. The direction is taut throughout, maintaining tension and shocks as well as some crisply delivered laughs. The plot does meander as the group have numerous adventures to reach their goal, but the gradual and admirable escalation of violence and bloodshed shows a respect for pacing that keeps us on the edge of our seats. Michael Caine puts in a touching supporting performance as an aging hippy caring for his Alzheimer-stricken wife and the scene where Owen turns into a midwife is priceless.
Given the deep issues at stake here, the odd scene suggesting Theodore Faron (Owen) does some soul searching would not have come amiss, but this is a movie crying out for a sequel: could we yet see a more mature approach to this undeniably interesting plot? Pigs do indeed fly, the pig in this episode being an inflatable one over art-enclave Battersea Power Station - Pink Floyd fans should be delighted. When George W Bush assumed power, I recall an American liberal saying they would now start a stopwatch to world war three. In the film, the British Government bomb hundreds of innocents to eliminate insurgents and we hardly notice, playing on our fears to give substance to any hope, no matter how improbable. The credits roll out with an old angst-filled Jarvis Cocker song, (c*nts are still) Running the World.