Film Review: Children of Men
Children of Men is a bleak, but thrilling story about a future society where all women are infertile and no babies have been born for over eighteen years. It is set in Britain in 2027 and human’s imminent extinction has created a culture of dispair and conflict so that the country has become a police state teetering on the brink of collapse amid the littered streets, immigrant concentration camps and warring terrorist groups.
Clive Owen stars as a burnt out former activist called Theo Faron who is recruited by a radical group to help them secretly transport a pregnant woman to the safety and hope of the Human Project. The chaos and violence is pitched somewhere between the dystopian vision of V for Vendatta and Barry Hine’s post acopalyptic Threads. Faced with struggle and no future at all, people resort to tribalism and brutality, which makes you wonder whether they deserve to survive at all. For example, Bexhill has turned into a refugee camp where East European and Islamic immigrants are penned up in the worst kind of conditions you could ever imagine. You see bodies lined up on the side of the road in body bags after immigrants have been arbitarily executed. It is even more shocking because these ghettos are located in suburban England rather than in wartime Poland. The movie is often filmed like a documentary to give it a disturbing realism brought alive by the mud, dust, desparate fighting and frantic, camera shots.
It is not all doom and gloom. There are moments of relief and kindness that make the film seem warmer and more hopeful. Theo takes refuge with his old hippie friend Jasper, warmly played by Michael Caine who cooks, jokes and plays old rock music as if it was still the 1960s. The pregnancy is portrayed as a symbol of hope that there is still a chance for women to give birth to children and safeguard humanity’s future. The religious symbolism is possibly over-egged, but it is quiet and not too sentimental.
This is a very good dystopian film. It has very strong performances by a great cast, especially Clive Owen. He is the everyman who goes through his own transformation from a burnt out slob to someone who can make a difference. He speaks for lots of us by showing us where we are at the moment, where we are going if we don’t change and what we can become.