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Children of MenAuthor PD James is renowned for her crime fiction, with a global audience for her Inspector Dalgleish novels. So her publication of 'The Children Of Men' in 1993 came as a shock. Inspired by news stories detailing the decline of fertility in the West, she re-staged the Christian nativity in a future Britain. Received by literary critics as a somewhat cranky work, and ignored by the science fiction community who never enjoy a "serious" writer padding around on their turf, the novel was a curio with themes that have, from the perspective of the 21st century, become increasingly relevant.
Director Alfonso Cuaron and writing partner Timothy J Sexton make all the right decisions in adapting James' novel for the screen, simplifying the plot into a chase movie and pushing the big contemporary themes of immigration, terrorism, infertility and social decline to the fore.
Having directed Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban on these shores, Cuar??n resists the temptation to relocate the action to America. Instead, we get a washed out vision of London and Sussex that recalls England in the 1970s. The last human was born in 2009 and in the subsequent 18 years of infertility, all progress has ceased. London has returned to its bad habits, leaving binbags piled up in alleyways, covering its tube trains in a mess of graffiti and letting fires burn in its streets and bombs explode in its cafes. It is a winter of discontent that will never end; there will be no spring here, no rebirth.
Wandering numbly through these last days is Theo, played by a dissolute, unshaven and shoeless Clive Owen. He still goes to work, adding a tot of whisky to his morning coffee and puffing on a fag, slowly extinguishing himself from this dying world. He drives out to smoke dope with his friend Jasper Palmer (Michael Caine), once a political columnist, now a hippie survivalist guffawing and stoned at the end of it all. He cares for his wife, an award-winning photojournalist made catatonic under torture by the militaristic government.
We learn this from the photographs and newspaper cuttings littering Palmer's house. This is a film with a busy background; news broadcasts and placards act as an exposition of the state we're in. Thus we learn that New York was destroyed by an atomic bomb, that the rest of the world is in chaos and it is this global tumult that drives so many refugees to the borders of militarised Britain.
Then, from out of nowhere, hope arrives. Theo is snatched by his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), leader of a resistance group called "the Fishes" (if you remember your religious education from school, the early Christian groups used the symbol of the fish to identify one another). The Fishes have found a young refugee called Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey). Miraculously, she is eight months pregnant. Can they and Theo deliver her to the rumoured Human Project, and thus save mankind, or will civil war kill this last chance for a saviour?
Theo and Kee's journey takes them into the detainment camp of Bexhill, an English town turned into a prison for the refugees. It is here that the film becomes disturbing, powerful and moving, as the images so closely resemble contemporary war-zones, from the Lebanon to Baghdad.
As fighting erupts in Bexhill, we are plunged into a hell, in which the screams of Kee's newborn child cannot be heard over the exploding shells and murderously careless gunfire. Trapped in a block of flats, Theo decides to walk Kee and her baby through the conflict, hoping that the sight of the child will momentarily still the carnage. It is profoundly moving, if only because one appreciates how - in our world - children are treated as so much collateral damage.
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