Buckets of both style and substance combining to deliver something quite remarkable.

Rating: 8/10 (16 March 2009)

Children of Men is, at very separate and reasonably spaced intervals, terrifying; awe-inspiring; tragic; humbling; visually stunning and just generally all out incredible. It tells a very simple story of an everyday and unspectacular man but doing spectacular and extraordinary things for the survival of the human race set amidst a spectacular and extraordinary backdrop. The film is a neo-noir of sorts as well as a science fiction, a war film and at times a horror film when you genuinely feel that 'pinch' on occasion the protagonists are under genuine threat; not from an uncanny enemy but from an uncanny situation. It is all played out with an underlying theme of the social commentary as Britain, indeed the world, is either on the brink of, or has already, fallen apart from within.
Indeed, the year is 2027 and the United Kingdom lies on the brink of some sort of society-led disaster following a mass influx of foreign people given the state the world has managed to get itself into. The reason for this is that the human race is drying up; no woman has given birth for almost twenty years  science cannot provide the answer and everyone eventually puts it down to the fact it is some sort of worldwide pandemic invoking infertility. Within London lives Leo Faron (Owen), a former activist turned bureaucrat who will, by the end of the film, have gone on a harrowing journey through grit, grime, war-zones and some situations in the middle of nowhere in which his life and what he feels is his duty are put at immense risk.
At its core, Children of Men is a neo-noir of a lonely and disgruntled male lead who, like everyone else in the world it would seem, is very much down on his luck. But the feeling is mutual throughout England and in the classic sense of the term, Leo is given a 'job' or a 'task' by someone that begins relatively easily or seems straight forward on the surface but will entangle and involve him deeper than he would've liked, pushing him to the front-line and back again. Leo can obtain the necessary paperwork ex-flame Julian (Moore) wants in order to transport a yet unseen woman called Kee (Ashitey) from wherever she is to a group known as the Human Project, a task-force dedicating to curing infertility. While the manipulation of time and space is limited only to the fact the film takes place in the future, there are several scenes set amongst a rural backdrop that sees our lead struggle in terms of survival when it becomes apparent that hanging around would be a very bad idea.
Life in London sees people hang British flags and cricket bats on the walls of their offices, but rather than act as petty pieces of iconography like they would do in so many other, more inferior films to enforce that 'Yes, these people are English  you can tell because they've got a cricket bat on the wall(!)', Children of Men sees these people as the sorts living in such desperate times that the props on the wall are a clinging on to whatever items that remind them what it's like to be British amidst all this mass-immigration, violence and hatred going on around them. Additionally, it is desperation that sees Leo take the job; there is a sense he is in financial turmoil when he rather feebly accepts the 'busfare' that Julian and her small group toss for him in the middle of the road following an apprehension and a van journey.
To say why it is that this young woman named Kee attracts all the attention is almost an unnecessary spoiler in itself but the revelation as to why she is acts as the ending of the setting up of events and the beginning of the journey itself when it becomes apparent to Leo how important she really is and that his job to escort her just took on a little more weight. I also liked the sly labelling of the character, foreshadowing what it is to come in the sense she really is 'key', referring to importance more than anything. Following on from this, and adding to that constant feeling of the presence of noir, Leo blurs the boundaries between right and wrong as he goes against police wishes and even lies his way into a particular secluded zone made specifically for immigrants when he uses a policeman named Syd (Mullen) to take him into the said area.
But no one watching can go against Leo and actually want him to fail in his mission. The film, visually, is constructed around the use of several long takes of immense and quite disturbing action in a sequence of scenes not done as impressively as this since Spielberg produced the final twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Leo dons a withered Olympic themed top with London 2012 on it, echoing the cricket bats on the wall from earlier  it's a clinging on to what we were. However, with an extra 'e' on the end to produce 'London-e' and you have the past participant of 'to do' making it sound like something that has been 'done'; dismissed or has withered away and is now in the past tense in an ominous fashion, such is the apocalyptic world in which Children of Men brings to life and such is the manner in which the film works on so many levels.