Children Of Men

UK Release Date. 22 September 2006
Certification. 15

Running Time. 1 hour 49 mins
Director. Alfonso Cuarón
Cast. Clare-Hope Ashitey, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Julianne Moore, Clive Owen.
Rating. 81%

Review.

Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men is a daring adaptation of a 1993 P.D. James novel, The children of men. Whilst James's novel was an explicitly a Christian fable about faith and loss, Cuarón's thrilling adaptation expertly blends science fiction, action and drama to produce a film of epic magnitude.

After 18 years of global infertility, humanity is forced to contemplate it's very extinction. Amidst the global social unrest, the UK remains one of the last semi-stable nation states. As such it becomes a magnet for migrants fleeing poverty, plague and conflict, only to find themselves demonised and imprisoned in vast coastal internment camps. A cynical former activist, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is persuaded by his ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore) to help the first pregnant woman in 18 years, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) evade the clutches of authority. 

The political landscape Cuarón paints is a brutal one, and one he paints it in a palette of mist and drizzle. A desolate world where things have been wearing out for 20 years and no one has bothered to replace, let alone repair, them. London is still London, only dirtier, and with heavy, iron cages for captured refugees seemingly on every street corner. The crumbling urban infrastructure and squalid streets only serve to amplify the inequality in society. Yet rarely has ugliness been portrayed with such beauty as it is by Cuarón and his acclaimed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. 

The film features two of the most ambitious, technically complex, long-take sequences I have ever seen. The first is a four-minute roadside ambush, shocking in its escalation and sudden violence, filmed from inside the car. The visceral, kinetic energy serves Cuarón's intention of immersing the audience in the disturbing close up realism of civil unrest.

But the film's boldest stylistic flourish comes later. An even more dazzling six-minute shot, in which Theo escapes capture at the Bexhill-on-Sea refugee camp and runs out through a sprawling, chaotic and raging war zone. Paying homage to Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle Of Algiers, this sequence apparently took almost two weeks to choreograph. Even then, the finished shot was nearly ruined at the last minute when fake blood droplets splashed onto the camera lens. However it is said that Emmanuel Lubezki persuaded an exasperated Cuarón that it was better to continue shooting, and rightly so. The blood droplets on the camera lens look like an inspired visual effect rather than a happy accident. 

In Children Of Men, Alfonso Cuarón paints a bleak picture of our future that feels prescient with each passing year. Perhaps more relevant than ever, the film feels unnervingly like a grim prophecy of our current climate - a world reshaped by right-wing populism, xenophobia and homeland insecurity. Like Blade Runner before it, Children Of Men depicts a haunting vision of a dystopian future, yet unlike Ridley Scott's seminal piece of work, Cuarón would appear ultimately hopeful about humanity's chances for survival. 

Frequently moving, occasionally harrowing and an unassuming masterclass in cinematic technique Children Of Men is, without doubt, one of the best science fiction films of the 21st century.