It’s hard to single out one moment in director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men that doesn’t feel urgent, tense or, more frighteningly, very plausible. Set in a dystopian, war ravaged future Britain where no child has been born for 18 years, the film effectively draws a straight line between the bleak, bombed-out future on the screen and current events, including the war in Iraq and the crackdown on illegal immigration.
“This is where we’re heading,” Cuarón is trying to say, but Children of Men, based on the book by P.D. James, is remarkable not because of its social commentary, but for the way it doles the commentary out.
Cuarón — clearly a follower of the “show, don’t tell” philosophy — has crafted a thrilling technical achievement here, creating a gray, violent British police state full of visual exposition that shows us everything we need to know. We’re not told the world is in chaos, we see it in the newspaper clippings with wartime headlines, the downbeat TV news reports about casualty counts and terrorist bombings, the political graffiti and in the faces of caged refugees on the street.
Corporate structures and bureaucratic buildings are all that stand intact - it’s hard times for sure. It’s anyone’s guess as to who started the war or who’s on the right side, but that information isn’t really pertinent to the film’s simplistic story.
Clive Owen cuts a decidedly glum figure as Theo, a former revolutionary turned bureaucratic drone who now kills time by getting high with an aging pot dealer (played warmly by Michael Caine). Theo’s revolutionary past comes back to tap him for a favor in the form of his ex-wife (Julian Moore), the leader of a political extremist group. Moore’s faction is protecting a young woman (Claire Hope Ashitey) who, somehow, is pregnant. It’s up to Theo to use his political pull to get the pregnant woman, named Kee, to another political group called The Human Project. There, supposedly, Kee will get the medical treatment and care she and her baby will need to survive.
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