(Image courtesy of www.impawards.com)
Directed by:
Alfonso Cuarón
Starring:
Clive Owen …. Theodore Faron
Julianne Moore …. Julian Taylor
Michael Caine …. Jasper Palmer
Claire-Hope Ashitey …. Kee
Chiwetel Ejiofor …. Luke
Pam Ferris …. Miriam
Peter Mullan …. Syd
Danny Huston …. Nigel
It’s 2027, a child hasn’t been born throughout the entire world since 2009, and the youngest person on earth has just died. That’s how Alfonso Cuarón opens up his latest film based on the P.D. James novel by the same name. Reproduction is the main reason we exist, without it there isn’t much of a reason to carry on. Not much of a reason to follow the rules either.
This epidemic has sent the world in to spiraling chaos, with all of the worlds governments collapsing from the hysteria. But as the films says, “Only Britain Soldiers on”, all it cost was to turn the country in to a police state. Detaining and caging up any and all refugees that sneak in to the country. People being pulled off the streets and forced in to large cages, treated as vermin. The few visions we see of this mentality at play are enough to be etched in to our memory for a long time, they parallel the Nazi concentration camps from the 40’s and the more recent pictures we’ve seen from detainment centers like Abu Ghraib.
The city that is perceived by many as the last refuge of civility is in itself not all rainbows and sunshine. The country is slowly losing its will, refugees are waging war to get in. All around the towns are graffiti covered walls with slogans like “Last One to Die Please Turn Out the Light,” faith is fleeting. People are fed up and war is raging, you can’t even go out for a coffee without the possibility of a bomb going off nearby. A world where anti-depression pills are part of the rations and your legally able to purchase an over the counter product that is essentially death in a box (yet marijuana is still illegal). This is a world that children shouldn’t be a part of, and perhaps that’s why there are none left.
Then we meet Theo (Clive Owen), a guy who realizing early on that fighting over something that in few decades wouldn’t matter made him put a lot of things in to perspective and instead chose a menial pencil pushing job to pass the time. It’s not that he doesn’t have his own views and opinions on what’s happening but, all things considering, does it really matter? After finally accepting his and the rest of mans fate, everything gets turned upside down when his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), now turned activist, re-enters the picture and asks for his help to get an illegal immigrant, by the name of Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), out of London and to a safer place. They need to do this because Kee holds hope for humanity – she’s pregnant.
They need to get her safely to The Human Project, a rumored secret governmental organization hard at work trying to figure out where everything went wrong and how to fix it. If the place actually exists is a non-matter, all that Theo cares about is that there’s a small bit of hope, and he’s going to hold on to it for dear life and do everything in his power to protect it. But there’s a problem, the others who were holding Kee’s pregnancy a secret have other plans for the child, to use it against the country that cages their people up. So when Theo takes Kee out of London, the extremists are hot on his tale to regain their one bartering chip.
Owen commands the screen, his characters been thrown back and forth – both literally and figuratively – and the world he once looked at as irredeemable finally sees a little light. And Owen’s performance pulls off that difficult role with ease, showing that he’s still the most underrated actor working today. Also in the film is Michael Caine, who much like Owen is easily capable of making his presence known every time he pops up in the film, his character is a noble man who’s still got a bit of faith left in him, and Caine shows that perfectly. The young actress Claire-Hope Ashitey and Moore both play the roles given to them quite well, but only make the best of what they’re given, which isn’t much.
Cuarón’s style of filmmaking here no longer makes him the top visionary to keep an eye on, with Children of Men he has officially made his stand as one of, if not the, best director working today. In his previous films Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban we saw that he has an undeniable style all to himself. Here his choice of filming scenes continue to impress and show improvement for the director. The choice of long single shots can be a large gamble in films today, mainly because so many people do them and it becomes obvious that they’re simply trying to impress and not tell a story. Not here, the style choice never once take you out of the films, only enhancing the story that Cuarón is trying to tell.
If you look back at all the futuristic tales we’ve seen grace cinema screens, they all tend to be one of two things: either a huge flashy CGI-fest, or the complete opposite, a world filled with decay and people wearing a whole lot of leather. Alfonso Cuarón is one of the few directors I’ve ever seen to straddle those two ideal futuristic visions and still manage to have his entire film feel hauntingly plausible. He doesn’t go for the huge theatrics you might find in Spielberg’s Minority Report or A.I., nor does he go for an Escape From New York or Mad Max approach either.
Instead he goes for a truthful and believable rendition of what our society might be like if there was nothing left that could redeem humanity. What we would be capable of if we already knew our fate. How the world would still feel a need to carry on even if there was no hope left. Doing menial jobs that in sixty years wouldn’t even matter. He looks at those small things that would help us carry on in a world that has no future. Well, a world that had no humans at least.
But the lingering questions that stay after the film are what make it all even greater. Do we deserve to carry on considering all the evil that we’re capable of committing on both ourselves and the environment around us? Should we be able to spawn more hate in to that world? Is this just mother natures way of saying that we’re a failed experiment? The film shows no sense of false hope, Cuarón holds back no punches when he shows his vision of what the future might hold if an event like this were to take place.
