Children of Men

I actually sat still long enough tonight to get through a movie: Children of Men. Gotta say, it wasn’t an easy view. The plot goes a little something like this: It’s 2027 in Britain and women worldwide have been infertile for almost 20 years. Some nebulously unspecified holocaust has racked the rest of the world and the U.K. is the only bastion of ‘civilization’ left. Because of this foreigners and immigrants are declared illegal. With no children society is coming unglued because The End is in sight. Sort of like On the Beach with the end of humanity happening in slow motion.

There’s a bit more to it, but I don’t want to blab too much for those that haven’t seen it. With the concepts the movie is based on it would have been exceeding easy for it to devolve into a world class downer or a “message movie”. While it was a bit depressing it was also pretty compelling. Overly active minds will probably extract cautionary tales from every angle of the film. Case in point; go to YouTube and type Children of Men into the search bar. Look at a few of the comments below each clip. Lazy thinkers love their dystopia wrapped neatly and presented to them whole. The work is science fiction.

The First World has had a fixation with dystopian futures for a few generations now. Thus far nearly all of it hasn’t panned out. People’s Exhibit A: Paul Ehrlich. Another aspect of this first world dystopia fetish; it’s always just around the corner. People’s Exhibit B: Mega Disasters on the History Channel. Not that this particular series is unique. Nearly all the science documentaries produced in this country have some sort of tie in to potential future calamity. The entire genre seems to have enlarged considerably over the past decade or so. You have to be a certain level of rich to allow dystopian fiction into your entertainment repertoire. Maybe this is where our guilt lives when we remove god from the equation. (Those that know me will know that was not an evangelical statement.) Sounds like somebody’s thesis waiting to be written.

From an academic standpoint it’s an excellent movie. It’s so cleanly filmed that at times it felt like a Stanley Kubrick production. The ugliness was beautifully shot, if that makes any sense. The violence is presented to look unchoreographed. Violence that is scripted and presented to look clean ends up making it more palatable, which it shouldn’t be. As I said, it’s a tough film to view but strangely compelling. Probably worth watching, just not before bed.

Ares