Two contradictory visions of the future packed into one film

Rating: 5/10 (21 April 2007)

The film depicts a not too distant dark future in which natural resources like drinking water have apparently become so scarce that most societies have fallen apart among fights over their distribution and instead turmoil and chaos are ruling. Britain has kept its status as a nation at the price of becoming a brutal police state that doesn't respect human rights any longer in its fight against rebels and refugees from other parts of the world. (The latter of whom are kept and treated like animals while getting deported into refugee camps.) The other vision which the film presents is that of the infertility of mankind for unknown reasons so that 18 years have passed already since the last birth of a human being.
This is the background on which the story is developed. However, the problem I have with this is that both of these visions don't fit together very well. Many of the environmental problems we are facing today and will be facing in the future are more difficult to solve due to over-population and would rather be relieved if mankind would diminish every day. Also the fights over natural resources should decrease and not increase if all humans knew that the days of mankind are counted and that day by day there are fewer people among whom they have to be shared. So for me the different aspects of the film simply don't add up to a plausible whole.
The story which evolves on that background is not very plausible either. There are different sorts of rebels ("fishes", "fugees") fighting against the government and also having their own inner fights. A young refugee woman has become pregnant against all odds and for some reason is now trying to get to some mysterious "Human Project" with the help of some untrustworthy rebels who apparently have their own hidden agenda.
Since from today's perspective the worsening of the environmental problems is by far more likely than global human infertility, the film would have made a good comment on our problems without the latter point. Perhaps the authors were just uncomfortable with the message that would have come across then: Namely that less humans would actually be a good thing and not something to be dreaded. With the combination of those aspects the message is mixed if not to say contradictory: Humans can not peacefully coexist with limited natural resources and yet their diminishing would be a catastrophe.
The film deserves some credit however for its strong and impressive imagery.