Excellent in every sense

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2007)

Children of Men succeeds in being a believable vision of the future, being a genuinely thrilling action movie and keeping its feet firmly in today's reality. Let's take a closer look.
Why the movie succeeds in portraying the future is that it realizes in a few decades nothing really happens. For an example, the TV sets are all wide screen and flat, cars look a bit futuristic but don't fly, the military still uses normal guns. There are subtle hints at how extrapolating from now to the future can produce funny things, such as an old man who listens to Aphex Twin and other music you wouldn't except older people to like. The key is the subtlety, lesser movies overdo this and make everything more fiction than future.
The action scenes were the most thrilling I have seen in a while. Most movie directors think fast-paced editing is the key to excitement and action, and this movie proves they are and always have been wrong. To be exciting, you need uncertainty. Most movies don't have that, you can count on the first billed actors to live so there isn't much excitement.
In Children of Men, the main action sequences consist of one continuous shot (sometimes faked). There is no MTV editing that only confuses and is usually used to hide how boring the action would be without it. The result is something you can admire for it's technical merit alone, not to mention how much it helps to make the viewer a part of the scene.
Finally, Children of Men creates its starting point by expanding on the idea of sectarian violence, bombings and other things that sadly are so everyday even now that it isn't really in the news anymore. While the premise of no children being born anymore is maybe the most unbelievable thing in the film, it works because the setting otherwise is from our time. And you can somehow expect a hellish situation like that can only bring even more uncertain things.
Children of Men was easily my favorite movie of 2006. It also is one of the best movies I have ever seen.