Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón is a film adapted from P.D. James's 1992 novel The Children of Men. The movie shows a tattered world in which no human child has been born for 18 years and the youngest has just died. As human extinction looms, violence reigns.
Children of Men is chilling because it rings true. Mankind dying with whimper. Infertile and without a future, civilization steadily descends in chaos. What makes the movie frightening is the superimposition of history on a near future. We see refugee camps in the UK that look, not by accident, like the West Bank or Gaza or Fallujah. The western middle class of the earth now live in the misery once found only in the poorest nations. We can see new technology, but only in the hands of the super rich and the military, the latter having become even more obviously an agent of the former. The acting is very good, but I think the most powerful part of the film is the background story and the visual environment. How fragile civilization might be and what it really might look like if we all gave up on it.
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