A word of warning.

This is not so much a film review as my meanderings but, well, its likely to go on a bit.

I mean, there’ll be an intermission for sure, but when a film renders me speechless for half an hour after I’ve left my seat, there’s payback. For you.

Plus there’s a bit of a spoiler here too. So if you don’t want to know what happens in Children of Men go and hide behind your sofa right now.

PD James’ book Children of Men, is set only 15 years from now at date presumably too close to comfort for modern audiences but Alfonso Cuarón’s movie based on the 1993 novel, and set in an all too tenable 2027, paints a haunting picture of distopic post-2012 London, there are sandbags on Regent Street, armed check-points at Whitechapel, bombings as frequent and expected as radio failures on the Northern Line.
2008 has seen the birth of the last human being on earth - men and women worldwide are rendered infertile. Globally we see, that robbed of the ability to reproduce, humanity has lost faith in itself. In the absence of perpetuity, hopelessness reigns. A world without a chance of new life; without the possibility of a future has nothing to live for, no exception to prove its rule, no tomorrow to look towards and anarchy has set in. Faced ultimately with the extinction of the human race, abject finality and singular introversion have bred fear, prejudice, and hatred.

An aging population, the burgeoning Orwellian governance of ‘Homeland Security’ and the distribution of state-issued suicide pills typify a new island state of Britain, where domestic travel is subject to permits and the problem of illegal immigration is solved through enforced repatriation of non-British refugees is via the squalid tented cities of internment camps - or a gunshot to the head. This locked down United Kingdom is the context for a grimly painted fable and its grudging protagonists.

The Fish, a group of political dissenters and activists fighting for equal rights for refugees, kidnap alcoholic, pen-pushing, former activist Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a man merely existing under the new regime, sapped of his former political fervour by the weight of the world. Faron has been targeted as a foil to secure travel papers for the Fishes secret weapon in their mission to lead the ‘Uprising’, a miraculously pregnant teenaged refugee.

More than reluctant and initially lured by a £5000 sweetener, though almost hopeless to the point of surrender, Faron delivers the permit which are issued with the caveat of his companionship on the journey. Faron’s devotion and succour to pregnant Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) is sealed and their harrowing passage to the sanctuary of ‘the Human Project’ (mankind’s best mortal hope, a near mythological underground collective of scientists and artists somewhere overseas) is played out.

One of the most unnerving things about Cuarón’s London is how uncannily familiar it is. Sci-fi’s seductive futurism and scope for gadgetry is has been the downfall of many a director yet it’s the devastating familiarity of London in 2027 which is so startlingly prescient.

Its all so… likely.

No teleporters or cylons, no robot butlers or hoverbikes (though there is some kind of kickass handheld games system that blows the nintendo ds out the water) just tweeks; improved sat nav, social breakdown and a beautifully well observed, projected media for the evening standard’s poster boards.

In lesser films this subtlety might be window dressing, along with that pervasive serious-film melancholic blue tint and the seamless edits of the digital camerawork, to a common or garden call to ‘look at what we’re doing to the planet’.

The expertise at work in the narrative of Children of Men is the attention given to all pervading despair & hopelessness and subsequent salvation, rather than a macroscopic, navel-gazing investigation of the path that led us to this vision of the future. It’s a film about the future’s future rather than the present’s fate.

In a beautifully shot, ambitiously directed, relentless scene which resonates as much with echoes of embedded foreign correspondent’s reports from Kandahar as Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Faron dodges machine gun rounds, mortars and rifle-fire in the burned out carcass of Bexhill-On-Sea. Caurón fills the cinema with an unflinching sensual assault of piercing cries and deafening booms, an unholy crescendo leading to the segment’s stunning conclusion.

Guns fall silent. All fighting stops. All for the sake of a child. Men and women, bloodied and filthy, armoured or defenseless, all humbled in front of a baby. The one and only child in all the world - at once a symbol and saviour, hours old and still swaddled in a cape of it’s terrified mother. Tiny, helpless and mewling; a child who means more to any of the assembled masses, the dissipated hordes, the new bureaucrats, the genuflecting, self-flagellating moralists, more to the barren world than anything it could conceive of and symbolises everything it has come to forget in the struggle to find a cure.

Hope.

Hope isn’t a word.
Hope isn’t a feeling, or a promise.

It is the birth of that child.

(Children of Men opens in America on December 25th)