“Born in 2009, the son of Marcello and Sylvia Ricardo, a working-class couple from Mendoza, he struggled all his life with the celebrity status thrust upon him as the world’s youngest person.” Theo (Clive Owen) is just trying to order a coffee in a cafe as a crowd huddles around a television reporting the news that 18-year-old ‘Baby’ Diego has died today, November 16th, 2027. He was stabbed to death at a bar for refusing to sign an autograph. Theo gets his coffee and indifferently pushes his way through the wet-eyed crowd back to the street. He walks a few steps down the block towards his office and then stops to situate himself. We can tell that for him, it’s just another day in London. Then something awful happens.
Children of Men (2006) is a film that will go down as one of the best of its generation. Plenty has been written to this effect, but to watch it is to be pummeled with a shockingly realized world that becomes easier to imagine as you age. To rewatch it, as I have many times, is to be pummeled all over again: how is it I didn’t remember Theo’s visit to his high-up government friend? Oh, right, the suicide kits were provided by the government. Ahh, the Human Project operates like this.
So, as I was saying, something awful happens, and Theo goes to work anyway. He ducks out early to catch a train to his friend Jasper’s (Michael Caine) place to smoke weed in the countryside. The train whizzes past refugees (“fugees”) who throw rocks at the barred windows. When Theo arrives, refugees are being herded onto buses for deportation. When Theo goes home, and he’s walking down the street, hundreds of refugees are locked in cages on the sidewalk as deportation crews filter through a housing project, throwing belongings over balconies, weeding out anyone who shouldn’t be in the country. A digital billboard in the background reminds us that “Avoiding fertility tests is a crime.” Theo doesn’t care about any of it.
There is an efficiency of story-telling that sneaks right by the viewer: we follow Theo from scene to scene as he takes us through almost every aspect of dystopian life. He goes to work, to the countryside, back into the city, through a refugee zone, on the train, into the halls of power, etc. The movie takes us to these places with such narrative credibility that you don’t doubt for a second the journey Theo is on. His actions and movement feel organic in the fleshed-out dystopian universe we’re presented with. The detail and scope will leave your head spinning after a watch. You may watch it again and find you’ve forgotten scenes simply because you were still processing other scenes. It’s remarkable. Game designer Neil Druckmann liked the movie so much that he used it as the stylistic and thematic basis of The Last of Us.
Early on in Children of Men, Theo, despite his middle-aged slide into apathy, is hit with a lightning bolt of a situation, and he will spend the rest of the film attempting to cobble his compassion for humans back together. If you haven’t seen the movie and you take this recommendation to watch, I encourage you to go in as cold as possible: no trailers, no reviews, no research. It will be a rewarding watch unlike many you’ve had.
The characters in Children of Men grapple with moral decisions, big and small, scene after scene. Whether it’s Theo’s deciding to take another drink, a government ordering the brutal deportation of immigrants, or a group of “freedom fighters” compromising the individual for the “greater good.” If you feel at any point like the characters aren’t making decisions that help others, consider what Theo’s high-ranking government official friend said when asked how he can live his life: “I just don’t think about it.”
Children of Men
Written by Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and P.D. James; Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
2006
109 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Amazon Prime
You’ll like this if you like: Blade Runner: 2049 (2017) Come and See (1985) 1984 (1984)
I also think this movie is really eerie seeing the relevance of what is going one with immigration around the world. The way that countries were treating immigrants aren't too far off from what people would want to do with them now.