While the rest of the world has collapsed into chaos, the United Kingdom conjured up in Alfonso Cuarón’s gripping but problematic dystopian thriller is hanging on by a militaristic thread. Terrorist bombs explode near Piccadilly. Immigrants and refugees are rounded up and held in pens, awaiting deportation. The world is plagued by infertility: it’s been 19 years since a baby was born. How do you live with no hope of a future for the species?
The former activist Theo (Clive Owen) has succumbed to whisky-fueled numbness—until he’s called upon by his ex-lover (Julianne Moore), now a radical leader fighting for refugee rights, to get transit papers for Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), a young African woman who desperately needs to flee the country. There’s good reason for the urgency: Kee is pregnant.
Cuarón and his phenomenal cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki bring this bleak, terrifying near-future to life in astonishingly tactile images. Cuarón (”Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Y Tu Mamá También”) is one of the most exciting filmmakers around. He stages breathtaking action sequences: one in which marauding thugs attack a car in the countryside is unlike anything you’ve seen.
The filmmaking is so accomplished you wish it were matched by the script, which was adapted from a P. D. James novel by Cuarón and four other credited writers. (That many scribes is never a good sign.) “Children of Men” is clearly more than a thrilling chase movie: it’s meant to hold a barely distorted mirror to the world we’re living in now. But the characters are too sketchy for the political metaphors to resonate. (The exception is Theo’s old hippie mentor and friend, beautifully played by Michael Caine, a pot-smoking cartoonist who’s retreated to his hidden home in the woods.) The infertility theme isn’t explored in any depth. What exactly will it accomplish to get Kee out of the country? Since the future of mankind rests on this pregnant girl, we want details. “Children of Men” leaves too many questions unanswered, yet it has a stunning visceral impact. You can forgive a lot in the face of filmmaking this dazzling.
