Movie Review: CHILDREN OF MEN

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Children of Men (2006)–****

It’s a beautifully sobering experience to watch Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Rarely does a film so daring and visionary hit the silver screen with the heartbreaking ferocity of Cuarón’s envisioned future.

Beyond the technology, it’s hard to tell that Children of Men does in fact take place in the future. The world in 2027 has spiraled downward so fast that the gloomy, surreal reality is hard to accept. Major cities have turned into slums, war zones or craters. In Great Britain, the government has closed its borders and instituted a no tolerance policy toward illegals seeking refuge from a world gone to hell. What’s worse it an 18-year-long infertility epidemic has hit all humans, meaning that London is just trying to sustain itself until extinction.

That’s were Theo (Clive Owen) comes in. A former activist whose idealism died along with the life he once knew, Theo is reduced to an office worker whose only pleasure comes from visiting his pot-dealing friend Jasper (Michael Caine). He’s just waiting for it to end when his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) kidnaps him. She still trusts him and knows he really does care about the future. That’s why she wants him to help transport a newly-found pregnant woman (Claire-Hope Ashitey) to a group of scientists that are trying to save humanity.

There have been comparisons made between Stanley Kubrick and Cuarón after some sawChildren of Men. Short of their shared maverick visionary qualities, Cuarón’s Children of Menis too hopeful a movie for Kubrick to have ever tackled. It’s also what makes this entirely gloomy experience worth every crushing second that must be dedicated to it.

Cuarón and the other members of screenwriting team (all four of them) created a screenplay that does so much in its simple plea. It merely asks us to consider if what we are doing now is the right thing. The simplicity is limited to that plea, though. Most of the film’s complex long takes require a level of control and cinematographic eye (thank you Emmanuel Lubezki) that can only be described as miraculous.

And the film as a whole is a miracle. It’s a grand cinematic effort that works from the smallest details of the set design to the great scope of the story. With the stoic Clive Owen perfectly cast as Theo, the film finds the ideal pace from its opening moments and doesn’t turn back or slow down. Most importantly, though, it’s an ominous vision of the future that makes Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report look like Spielberg was pulling punches.

There’s no softness to the blows coming at us from Children of Men. It’s a film that never waivers in its commitment to distress its audience with the visual poetry in its bedlam. Yet, there’s no regret or even hesitation on whether I’ll want to see it again. This film requires a second viewing from any viewer and will deservingly have it, maybe for generations to come.