Alfonso Cuarón’s Chil­dren of Men is absolutely one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Two view­ings have over­whelmed me with some of the strongest emo­tional reac­tions I’ve ever had to a movie. It is, at the very least, one of the best of 2007 (along with Pan’s Labyrinth and United 93), and every­thing the similarly-themed V for Vendetta could have been.

This cof­fee packs a wallop

The movie opens nearly two decades after the last human birth. Mass infer­til­ity is a ter­ri­fy­ingly plau­si­ble sci-fi trope in 2008, with loom­ing cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe, increased rates of autism and aller­gies, and the immi­nent threat of a globe-spanning con­ta­gious dis­ease out­break like SARS (a fic­tional flu pan­demic is alluded to in the film). As the infer­til­ity remains uncured, so too is it unex­plained for the audi­ence. The best sci­ence fic­tion avoids pedes­trian pseudo-science that tends not to date well (2001: A Space Odyssey being the excep­tion that proves the rule). The most detail we learn is that women are infer­tile, and we can assume that cloning and arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion of frozen eggs have failed. So by the time the film opens, the harsh fact that the human race is doomed to slowly die out is a given, and has reduced the world’s soci­eties into chaos. Only Britain has been able to sur­vive, to a point, using only the harsh­est total­i­tar­ian meth­ods. In pro­pa­ganda com­mer­cials glimpsed through­out the movie, Britain con­grat­u­lates itself for the fas­cism that makes it pos­si­ble to carry on; but is this kind of sur­vival worth the price?

Immi­grants flood the only coun­try with some sem­blance of sta­bil­ity, flee­ing unspec­i­fied atroc­i­ties abroad. All we learn of the United States is of a vague cat­a­stro­phe in New York creep­ily referred to only as “it.” Immi­grants are demo­nized as “fugis” (for “fugi­tives,” per­haps pun­ning on the deroga­tory British slang “paki” for any and all Mid­dle East­ern­ers) and penned in con­cen­tra­tion camps. Many shots explic­itly allude to infa­mous images of cap­tive enemy com­bat­ants in Guan­tanamo Bay. Sev­eral of the fugi­tive voices we hear are Ger­man, caus­ing one to won­der just what exactly may have hap­pened in Ger­many, and if it may have been some­thing we have seen before in human his­tory. My Ger­man is non-existent, but If I’m not mis­taken, we over­hear one cap­tive Ger­man woman bit­terly com­plain to her guard for being locked up in a deten­tion cell with black peo­ple. It’s not a pretty pic­ture of human nature, that at the worst of times, the worst of us comes out.

At gun­point is one way to recon­nect with an ex

The five cred­ited screen­writ­ers, usu­ally a bad sign, have done an extra­or­di­nary job of adapt­ing the orig­i­nal novel by P.D. James (who, accord­ing to IMDB, has an uncred­ited cameo in the café bombed in the open­ing moments of the film). I don’t know if I would go so far as to say the movie is “bet­ter” than its source mate­r­ial, but it is cer­tainly more vis­ceral and emo­tion­ally affect­ing to a post 9/11 audi­ence. As an adap­ta­tion, the many changes are jus­ti­fied and ben­e­fit the trans­la­tion to a dif­fer­ent medium and time. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, the chronol­ogy is con­densed from months to days, and the rel­a­tively polite insur­rec­tion­ist group The Five Fish has become a full-fledged ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion called sim­ply The Fish. Theo (Clive Owen) is younger, and no longer liv­ing a life of wealthy ease. He’s a gam­bler and alco­holic, and his orig­i­nal moti­va­tion to help The Fish is raw money. His cousin Nigel (Danny Hus­ton) is not the all-powerful War­den of Eng­land of the book, but rather merely the effete guardian of the Ark of the Arts. King Crimson’s dra­matic Mel­lotron dirge “In the Court of the Crim­son King” fit­tingly accom­pa­nies Theo as he vis­its Nigel, pass­ing into a walled city that sep­a­rates the priv­i­leged élite from the work­ing masses out­side (Naomi Klein pre­dicts the future dom­i­nance of such places in the DVD bonus fea­tures). The Ark is a point­less quest to archive the world’s great works of art, includ­ing every­thing from Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guer­nica, to Pink Floyd’s inflat­able pig.

Cry­ing babies don’t usu­ally have this effect on people

Sev­eral mind-bendingly impos­si­ble track­ing shots grace the film, so fluid and jus­ti­fied by the action that the mind barely reg­is­ters a lack of cut­ting. There is an incred­i­ble level of detail in the art direc­tion, but as Cuaron declares in the DVD bonus fea­tures, the goal to was be the “anti-Blade Run­ner.” Two decades hence, tech­nol­ogy has marched on only to a degree. What’s the point of inno­va­tion in fash­ion, auto­mo­biles, and con­sumer elec­tron­ics when the human race is doomed to extinc­tion? Eerie sights include fields of burn­ing cat­tle corpses (pos­si­bly due to mad cow dis­ease, or more likely the sim­ple fact that the farm­ing econ­omy has col­lapsed), aban­doned and crum­bling schools, and the promi­nence of dog rac­ing as the sport of choice in a world with fewer and fewer fit young peo­ple every day.

The Human Project is real

Chil­dren of Men may be a pun­ish­ingly bleak vision of the future, but there is hope to be had. Theo is a bro­ken man resolved to a slow death, both his own and of his species. But there is some­thing spe­cial within him; his for­mer lover Julian (Julianne Moore) trusts him over every­one else to do the right thing when pre­sented with a gift of hope: the first human child in two decades. Even ani­mals are drawn to him, includ­ing dogs, kit­tens, and deer. His friend Jasper (Michael Caine) praises the Hindu Peace Mantra, which also appears as an epi­gram after the cred­its (over the sound of chil­dren play­ing), and bears repeat­ing here:

Offi­cial movie site: www.childrenofmen.net

Must view: Daily Film Dose’s Great­est Long Track­ing Shots in Cin­ema, includ­ing Chil­dren of Men.

Must view: a reel of fake adverts made for the film by For­eign Office Design (via Kottke.org)

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.