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CHILDREN OF MEN
2006
Director
Alfonso Cuarón
Starring
Clive Owen
Clare-Hope Ashitey
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Julianne Moore
Michael Caine
Danny Huston
Runtime
109 minutes
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At the time of its release in 2006, CHILDREN OF MEN was perceived as a stern warning about xenophobia, totalitarianism, and the rise of the security state. A powerful indictment of the post-9/11 cultural landscape, the film vividly distills what Naomi Klein writes about in The Shock Doctrine: how the chaos resulting from crisis creates opportunities for the powerful. Today, CHILDREN OF MEN - loosely based on P.D. James' 1992 novel - has moved from the uncanny to the borderline prophetic; taking on a deeper and even more sinister salience. It all too painfully reflects a broken Earth devoid of hope and purpose.
The film follows Theo (Clive Owen), a depressed activist-turned-bureaucrat living in an austere and climate-ravaged London in 2027. A pandemic without clear cause has rendered humanity entirely infertile, giving way to myriad overlapping crises and plunging the globe into chaos. Theo returns to his radical past when he is reunited with his insurgent ex-wife (Julianne Moore), who tasks him with getting transport papers for a migrant woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), from his cousin in the government. When Kee turns out to be pregnant, Theo is forced to fight through both insurgents and military police hoping to get her to a rumored team of scientists who may be able to save her – and potentially the human race as well.
But the most resonant part of the film is the harrowing illustration of a country that has lost all hope. Systemic failures pile on top of each other one after another, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. At the extreme end, it speaks to the rising tide of 'doomerism' that is increasingly prevalent today – the notion that we are on an irreversible downward spiral of collapse and there's no way out. In CHILDREN OF MEN, the feeling of stagnation and malaise created by the crisis of fertility (which demands to be seen as symbolic of humanity's very real global climate emergency) leaves a defeated and lifeless people, with no hope of repairing themselves, simply trudging through the chaos as the last lights of civilization slowly fade out.
As Mark Fisher writes in his modern classic Capitalist Realism: "In the world of CHILDREN OF MEN, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. Public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals. Neoliberals have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in CHILDREN OF MEN, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. The catastrophe in CHILDREN OF MEN is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through."
And yet, amidst the doom, there's no mistaking why this movie was originally released on Christmas Day back in 2006. Within this film there is also a kernel of miraculous, redemptive hope. It may just be the best version of the Nativity story ever put to celluloid. We're all squatting together now, our little mangers behind the abandoned facades of a derelict planet.
The film follows Theo (Clive Owen), a depressed activist-turned-bureaucrat living in an austere and climate-ravaged London in 2027. A pandemic without clear cause has rendered humanity entirely infertile, giving way to myriad overlapping crises and plunging the globe into chaos. Theo returns to his radical past when he is reunited with his insurgent ex-wife (Julianne Moore), who tasks him with getting transport papers for a migrant woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), from his cousin in the government. When Kee turns out to be pregnant, Theo is forced to fight through both insurgents and military police hoping to get her to a rumored team of scientists who may be able to save her – and potentially the human race as well.
But the most resonant part of the film is the harrowing illustration of a country that has lost all hope. Systemic failures pile on top of each other one after another, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. At the extreme end, it speaks to the rising tide of 'doomerism' that is increasingly prevalent today – the notion that we are on an irreversible downward spiral of collapse and there's no way out. In CHILDREN OF MEN, the feeling of stagnation and malaise created by the crisis of fertility (which demands to be seen as symbolic of humanity's very real global climate emergency) leaves a defeated and lifeless people, with no hope of repairing themselves, simply trudging through the chaos as the last lights of civilization slowly fade out.
As Mark Fisher writes in his modern classic Capitalist Realism: "In the world of CHILDREN OF MEN, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. Public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals. Neoliberals have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in CHILDREN OF MEN, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. The catastrophe in CHILDREN OF MEN is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through."
And yet, amidst the doom, there's no mistaking why this movie was originally released on Christmas Day back in 2006. Within this film there is also a kernel of miraculous, redemptive hope. It may just be the best version of the Nativity story ever put to celluloid. We're all squatting together now, our little mangers behind the abandoned facades of a derelict planet.