Children of Men (2006)
DVD (region 1, 2, 4)
d. Alfonso Cuaron; pr. Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Hilary Shor, Iain Smith, Tony Smith; scr. Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby; novel. PD James; ph. Emmanuel Lubezki; m. John Tavener; ed. Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez; cast. Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Julianne Moore, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Charlie Hunnam, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Pater Mullan (109 mins)
Children of Men takes place in London 2027: the human race is sterile and it has been almost twenty years since the last human birth.
England is struggling with a flood of international illegal immigrants who are put into detention camps. A radical terrorist group, known as the “Fishers”, protest the government treatment of immigrants and refugees and recruit a man (Clive Owen) from outside their organization to escort the first pregnant woman in almost two decades, an immigrant, to safety. Along the way, he becomes her protector as they must enter a detention camp in order to work their way through and find safety on a research ship.
A bomb in a café begins Children of Men. It is apparently one of many that have been plaguing the city, although the residents are more concerned with the death of the world’s youngest human.
With the world plunged into anarchy, Britain has closed its borders and homeland security officers patrol for illegal immigrants, rounded up and imprisoned. In this world Owen is a warm-hearted cynic. His friend, Michael Caine, is a pot-smoking hippie who tends to his invalid wife, a journalist that MI5 deny torturing although is now left a devastated woman peering out of a window. The terrorists claim to be at war with the British government; they are idealistic, so much so that they are organized in their resistance, holding communal meeting to determine suitable courses of action in the struggle. They have stopped bombing although are the government’s scapegoat for any act of terrorism on British soil, there being a wave of such averaging a couple of bombings per month.
In the midst of an infertility crisis which could spell the end of the human race, many have retreated into religious faith, believing that the infertility is God’s punishment. Yet it is clear that religion is a last recourse and of no real consequence in the real world,
wherein it is the terrorist Fishers who ironically fight for a legitimate future for the human race as well as a fairer British society. As noble as the terrorists are, however, it is finally their political agenda and the need for media exposure which threatens the pregnant woman, the very future they would serve to protect. However, it is those individuals demonized as terrorists by the government because of their use of bombs that have the greatest concern for the future. Hence, the depiction of the Fishers is careful to frame them in terms similar to the IRA: not a nationalistic terror group but political soldiers at “war” – idealists. Indeed, the notion of the terrorist as idealist is far more common in British films than American cinema, hence the elevation of the terrorist to mythic martyr in the Orwellian War on Terror allegory of V for Vendetta, the notion of terrorism in opposition to an oppressive government found also in another Orwellian fantasy, Brazil.
The Fishers are organized along democratic lines, gathering at a safe house to vote on matters of policy. But, political fervour and dedication result in indifference and soon Owen realizes that both his life and that of the pregnant woman are in jeopardy if their fate is left in the hands of the Fishers. Hence, the Fishers’ attempts to enforce their ideological will mean that the pregnant woman is a political tool to them – with the literal future of humanity in their hands, they debate the practicalities of using the baby for political ends. Their politics has blinded them to the humanity of the situation, the film examining the difference between humanism and ideological dedication in terms of the fate of an individual whose self-determination ultimately falls into the hand of terrorists, not because she is their hostage but because they alone can guarantee her safety. In that, Children of Men is a clever inversion of the usual terrorist formula wherein the terrorists usurp another’s right to self determination – here they argue about how best to ensure it, even though their zeal threatens to overwhelm the humanity they claim to serve. In striving to ensure the self-determination of the future of humanity, they ironically usurp it for their own agenda.
The Fishers, in their pursuit of Owen and the girl, prove themselves more ruthless than idealistic, killing Caine – indeed, their indifference to human life and suffering (made possible by their ideological zeal) makes them callous executioners.
However, their inhumanity is surpassed by that of the government forces who are Nazi-like in their treatment of the illegal immigrant population, executing at will and forcing people into internment camps which are breeding grounds for Islamic terrorist causes eventually resulting in a full scale riot in which the Fishers, the Islamist refugees and government troops battle. In a magical moment the fighting is halted to allow the escape of the Owen, the woman and her baby (as she has given birth in the refugee camp). In the midst of the combat, the terrorist leader makes one final proclamation in rationalization of his actions – that sight of the baby will inspire an uprising that will overthrow the government. Although his politics are reasoned, his horrid willingness to expose the baby to harm’s way in order to make a politicized rather than humane point speaks of, once again, the film’s interplay between humanism and the ideology of revolution, the latter threatening to overwhelm the former in the name of political expediency, the same rationale the government would use in its inhumane treatment of the refugee population. Hence, the dominant theme in Children of Men is not just the survival of humanity but the survival of humanism above all, the two of them being arguably separate though inter-related concepts.
