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Derek Malcolm's rating
Fearful future has real resonance
By
Derek Malcolm
21 Sep 2006
London is on the edge of anarchy and a bleak, palid countryside is ruled by a totalitarian military regime hunting down rebels and terrorist factions.
Because of massive pollution, no woman can conceive, and mankind is threatened with eventual extinction. Immigrants from even more broken societies abroad are locked up in a huge camp on the South Coast.
No depiction of a dystopian future has looked better than Alfonso Cuarón's scarred version of a devastated England 20 years hence. Visually, Children of Men is a totally convincing adaptation of the P D James novel on which it is based.
The book is more than an awful warning about what might happen if we don't mend our ways. It contains religious metaphors and symbolism, and an assessment of why we have come to this pass - which the film merely hints at. It's more like a thoughtful action movie than a film with real resonance.
Theodore, the principal character, played by Clive Owen, is a bureaucrat, as was James herself, and a former activist stunned by his situation. He is shaken from inertia by the fact that a young woman (the excellent Claire-Hope Ashitey) is miraculously-discovered pregnant.
He is offered £5,000 to help save her and begins to feel that he should do so for better reasons than money. If he doesn't, she will fall into the hands of those who will never allow the birth to go ahead without demanding absolute control of the child. So his odyssey begins.
He finds himself accompanying the pregnant woman and a band of activists, led by his former lover (Julianne Moore), on a treacherous journey past both security checkpoints and armed terrorists towards the coast where members of the Human Project, a group of intellectuals working for a new society, are prepared to help.
Owen's performance, light years away from his more glamorous image, is fine. But the writing of his part is too bald to be entirely convincing and we consistently want to know more than Cuarón gives us. There are few quiet moments in the film which might have allowed us to the space to think.
A bearded Michael Caine appears as a veteran hippie who remembers better times and, if this borders on parody, there is Peter Mullan, highly effective in a small role as a sympathetic soldier.
The film's main strength is its cinematic depiction of a desperate world with considerable visual and kinetic skill. But, as often happens, a lavish production sometimes drowns out the subtleties of. the more thoughtful book upon which it is based.
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Reader views (2)
Looking disparingly at the cinema listings I couldn't see anything I wanted to watch, fashion films, feeble comedys and slated remakes. So i thought I may as well take a chance with Children of men. I'm glad I did.
Set in a grim not too distant future the human race has lost the ability to reproduce. No new births in nearly 20 years and none to come has doomed the human race. Anarchy is barely contained in this bleak future by a totalitarian police state yet we soon meet the one light in the darkness. A single pregnant woman, her baby conceaed by fringe grups seking to get her to the outlawed organisation "The Human project".
A linear plot without the expected and convoluted twists and turns makes this a very enjoyable adventure. I particularly praise the sustained pace of the film and the great use of sound. Catch it before it leaves the big screen.
- Al, Old Street, 13/10/2006 08:52
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This film was a dreadful disappointment. I expected a challenging, daring sci-fi thriller and saw a grubby, gloomy, BORING, nonsensical, pretentious and failed exercise.
The characters have no depths, no background, they are rushed absurdly into the story to make the plot move forward ackwardly from one idiotic situation to the next. The story is ridiculous and contradictory, are the 'goodguys' the one that kill everyone around?
We see a ruined, disguting, rubbish-covered London without any clue why it should be so. It all stinks of cliches and deja-vu, in all the most run of the mill sci-fi stories.
And in the end, there is so much 'adversity', dirt, big guns, bombs and explosions without rythm or reason that you just stop caring for anyone or anything in this film very early on!
You just wish bitterly that you had gone to see something else, something fun like 'the devil wears prada'. Now, that's a film worth your money and your time!
And a last thought about 'the plot' (if we can call it that much!): the human race has stopped reproducing. To anyone with a brain at the moment, does that not sound like a blessing?
- Josephine Thalbach, London, 02/10/2006 10:02
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