Children of Men. 2006. UK/USA/Japan. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Screenplay by Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hank Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James. With Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine. 35mm courtesy Universal Pictures. 109 min.
Intelligent and intense, Children of Men makes civilization’s last desperate gasp for survival seem inevitable. As imagined in Alfonso Cuarón’s loose adaptation of P. D. James’s dystopian novel, people in the near future seem to lack a future. A worldwide plague of infertility, the unthinkable prospect of childlessness, has brought about civil war in England. Cuarón treats the terrifying unfolding of events as Robert Capa might, recording the roundup and imprisonment of immigrant refugees, and the fog of urban battle, as documentary reportage. Michael Caine is said to have modeled his pot-smoking hippie sage on his friend John Lennon, offering in his touching scenes a kind of moral ballast to Clive Owen, the burnt-out, alcoholic pessimist who begins to accept his fate as a kind of saviour.