Let's start here — Children of Men is the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. It's one of those movies that seems, at 109 minutes, to be entirely too short, not because anything is missed or left out, but because the movie is so well done the time spent is quickly lost in the process of immersion. The pace and tone of this movie is set when a coffee shop explodes and a woman stumbles out of the rubble holding her arm, all before we are given the title of the movie.
The story takes place twenty years into the future, a world, that at first glance, does not seem too different from our own. There are no hovering cars. No ray guns. No reflective suits. But then we notice that terror groups, government controls, and mass media have turned our world into a fragmented dystopia. And, to top it off, for some mysterious reason humans can no longer reproduce. Be that as it may, with the human race facing extinction we still find ample time to kill and brutalize each other. In this reality lives Theo (Clive Owen), our post postmodern hero who takes his coffee with whiskey and searches for solace in a cigarette whenever he can.
We meet, Julian (Julianne Moore), Theo's old flame, now leader of the Fishers, who has returned into his life to ask him to use his connections to deliver a woman to the border. This woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), just happens to be pregnant. The life inside her is, of course, the most valuable commodity in the world. Life, long taken for granted, is now worth an incredible amount and Julian's sect wants the baby for their own political capital. Theo and Kee make a run for it and the rest of the movie is a pursuit thriller done so well I found myself clutching my jacket for protection.
By creating a very plausible future and ratcheting the violence beyond our present levels this is a movie that attacks ignorance and apathy head on. Children of Men is rife with social commentary. How did we get to our destructive future? Well, the movie doesn't come right out and say but you can catch clues: headline clippings of nuclear fallout over Africa, stories of flu pandemics, green sewage being pumped into a field as a car rolls by. A radio DJ introduces a hit song from 2003 "when people didn't know the future was right around the corner." Take that as you will, but this is a movie that doesn't want you to miss the point: the future is now.
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