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Children of Men has been playing at film festivals and is currently
on screens in the UK. It will open in the U.S. in late December, at
which time Jeffrey Overstreet's review will be published at Christianity
Today Movies.
Here, with an early look, is
Matt Page.
There’s a basic pattern in science fiction films
that all too often gets overlooked. Whatever it is that is different
from our world, never try to explain why “it” happens. It’s why we enjoy
Captain Kirk and Dr Spock boldly getting teleported to another outpost
of space’s final frontier, Marty McFly tripping back to the 1950s or the
T1000’s liquid metal magically reforming.
Once you start to explain a science fiction
film’s magic it invites the viewer to take it seriously, weigh it up,
and generally conclude that even if it could work, it’s much less fun
that way. It’s why the original Donnie Darko is better than the
director’s cut, why Morpheus’ speech is the most tedious part of
original The Matrix, and why the
Star Wars series turns dumb once it tried to explain the
Force. (Okay, there
are more problems than that with the latter Star Wars films, but
you get the point).
The makers of Alfonzo Cuaron's
s new film, Children of Men, have clearly watched and
learned. They make no attempt to explain why
it is that women lose the ability to have children
three years from now. Neither has humanity figured it out 18
years later when the story takes place. It also avoids the trap of
explaining why, all of a sudden, a woman called Kee (geddit?) has
suddenly become pregnant. All we know is that Theo (played
by Clive Owen) has been given the task of escorting her to safety
by his ex-girlfriend.
The other oft-ignored
rule of science fiction is to make your version of the future
believable. Early sci-fi portrayed it as a human built utopia --
pristine metal corridors inhabited by model citizens wearing
spotlessly shiny silver suits. Later films, such as Blade Runner
went to the opposite extreme, and gave us an equally unrealistic
futuristic hell.
What is impressive about the world that
Children of Men predicts is that it is so normal. Just as 1985
hardly seems any different to 2006, so this film’s 2027 feels not
entirely removed from today. Red buses still drive around London, people
still drink take-away coffee, and there is still a countryside to visit
in the car. At the same time billboards now host moving images, whilst
anti-immigrant sentiment has risen to oppressive levels. It’s not hard
to envisage this future as a place we could, one day, be living in.
It’s this anti-immigrant feeling that actually
threatens humanity’s very existence. Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), the
planet’s first new mother in 18 years has the misfortune to be a (re)fugee
in the Britain of the future. As such the police are keen to find her
and incarcerate her. Given the painfully familiar images of race riots
and Guantanamo Bay in our day, and the current rise in hatred towards
“foreigners” it is not hard to see that the film is making a point here.
Scenes of captured refugees permeate the film, and make for
uncomfortable viewing, notably towards the end.
Yet even as the tone of the film darkens,
so the light shining in that darkness brightens. A couple of the
latter scenes in the film hit on something truly moving and
transcendent. Curiously, on both occasions, it is just seconds before
the characters’ human nature forgets what has transpired and continues
as if nothing had ever happened. Thus emotional, powerful cinema is
welded with sharply insightful observations of the human condition.
What makes this film even more fascinating is the
use of religious imagery. When Key first tells Theo she is pregnant,
they are in a stable/barn. He exclaims “Jesus Christ” whist someone else
dubs it a miracle. The later birth scene has similar echoes of the
nativity. They are, perhaps, very un-explicit references, but the
result is resonant nevertheless. It is,
perhaps, not entirely coincidental that the film changes the book so
that a miracle has to happen to a woman’s body for this child to have
been conceived.
At times, Children
of Men is dark and pessimistic, with a nightmarish vision of the
future. Yet even in the midst of the horrors it depicts, it manages to
find hope. Perhaps the birth of a single child is enough to initiate
humanity’s salvation.
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