An extrordinary and mindblowing experience.

I wrote a comment on the movie before, entitled Children of Men and Our Future, purely based on the trailer and what I read about the story. It looked interesting then, and I told myself that this is probably one movie I shouldn't miss.

But that was all based on what little I knew about the movie then which at that point of time was not yet released. The actual movie was more powerful than I expected it to be.

The story

Theo (Clive Owen) plays a weary Brit struggling to survive in a world shrouded by terrorism, racism and senseless violence. Suicide is even promoted as the ultimate choice to escape this sad world in the form of suicide kits marketted by a company and aptly named "Quietus - you choose when". It is year 2027 in this fictional work whereby Britian is no longer what it is today. Starting from the year 2009, humans had mysteriously lost the ability to procreate. Eighteen years later, when the horror of this realization had barely set in, humans had begun on a route of self-destruction. While I admit I didn't quite catch how such a horrifying thing happened, looking at the already chaotic world that director Alfonso Cuaron created, it seems entirely believable and plausible given current events.

As the world mourned over the death of Baby Diego, an 18 year old teenager who was the youngest person on the earth at the time, Theo was unwittingly thrust into a terrorist organization by his ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore, who makes a shockingly short appearance). The purpose was to protect a young girl, Zee, (Claire-Hope Ashitey) who had been miraculously impregnated, and to send her and her child to the Human Project led by a group of scientists in search of ways to protect life once more. However, as events unfolded and trusted individuals were to longer there to help, and he took it upon himself to protect the girl and the child through war and disaster. Having lost a child before, Theo's conviction towards protecting and nurturing the newborn became something he would sacrifice everything for.

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The whole premise is a powerful one already. Like what one character, Miriam, said, "As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices." Indeed, I do believe that this would really happen if we would one day be unable to hear children's voices anymore. What is there left to hope for when you see the human race dying out year by year without the means to stop it from happening? Do see my old post for my take on this.

Even in the movie, Alfonso makes the wise decision in not providing any explanation as to why this tragedy happened. Instead, he brings us back to the painful experiences of the people in the movie when they realized that there would never be any children to walk the face of earth anymore. Theo and Julianna lost their child in a flu pandemic which swept the world in 2009, and ex-midwife Miriam recalls poignantly when they noticed that more and more miscarriages were happening around the world.

The direction

In year 2027, Alfonso has created a world that no longer practices tolerance. As the rest of the world faces destruction in the form of nuclear wars and other natural disasters, refugees began flocking to UK, only to be faced by a facist government which has started cracking down hard on illegal immigrants, with propaganda plastered everywhere urging British citizens to report any immigrants they see, even if they are your closest relatives. And hard they were indeed, where refugees are termed 'fugees' and they are gathered into Bexhill, the futuristic version of a Nazi concentration camp where death and suffering is everywhere and people are treated with the least amount of dignity. The incredible details that Alfonso adds to this world makes it all so terrifying and poignant.

Alfonso chose to use long takes in many of the chaotic scenes in the movie, meaning that technical-wise, every war scene is painstakingly cheorgraphed to show the extent of the chaos coming from the first person's point of view and coming from all angles. Alfonso is not apologetic about the violence as well, often showing people getting shot and bombed in full view of the camera. Yet it is this realism that draws you into this world filled with despair. A very powerful tool of which Alfonso may be the only director thus far who is able to manipulate with such merticulous thought.

This is probably one of the very few movies in which the direction catches my attention far more than anything else in the movie. If I dare say, this movie is a masterpiece thanks to Alfonso's merticulous attention to details in almost every aspect of the show, from sets to props to story to the emotions that emerge.

One of the most powerful moment for me in the movie was when the cries of Zee's baby resounded in the battered building where hundreds of refugees were hiding from the bombing and shootings surrounding them. There, as Theo held Zee and her baby closely to him while they left the building, the refugees knelt and cried, sacredly touching Zee and the baby as they realized the miracle that had befallen earth once again. As British soldiers stormed the building, they too were struck by the sight, many also falling to their knees and praying. It was a moment when all hostilities stopped and the surrounding was silent. Humanity seemed to return once again as the camera pans through the spellbound crowd in close-ups of refugees and soldiers alike. Everyone became human again. This was until a bazoka was fired from the building when humanity was forgotten and chaos resumed. Just when you thought Theo, Zee and the baby were finally going to be safe, humanity disappoints once again.

The ending was incredibly heartwrenching as well. You have to watch it to see what I mean.

The acting

Only one actor stood out for me. Top-notch acting from Clive Owen as the battered government agent who rose to the occassion till the very end. My impression of Clive Owen had always remained as Dwight in Sin City, or Dalton in The Inside Man - the cool, sauve and intelligent hero who was fearless in the face of injustice. Here, Clive turns into the ordinary man who became the hero only because of that last hope he has left for mankind. He is far from sauve here. Instead, he is passive from the despair that engulfed the world, bewildered that he was suddenly thrust into such a dangerous mission, trembled in fear and feelings of helplessness as he sees his loved ones killed in front of him, fumbled as he delivered Kee's baby in terrible conditions, and shrouded in uncertainty as he leads two extremely vulnerable people to safety. True to the title, Theo becomes the one to teach Kee how to wind her child in the last moments, a simple and basic technique which should have been intuitive to mothers of newborns. All because Kee, a teenager, was brought up in a world without babies.

This is not to say that the rest of the cast was no good. Just that the movie was told from Theo's angle and we seldom got to see other characters blossom. However, not that that matters because the direction of the movie justifies such an arrangement fair and square. Nevertheless, with what the other actors had to do, they did wonderful jobs at them. Special mention to Michael Caine, who played the hippie Jasper isolated from the chaos of the world with his dog and comatose wife who was persecuted for her political ideals. As always, Michael excels as the wise man who renders help and emotional support when the going gets tough. Also special mention to Claire-Hope Ashitey as Kee, the last hope for mankind who is both vulnerable yet strong, a symbol of the feminine power of humankind. As a relative newcomer, she certainly live up to her character.

In fact, many of these characters, played by established actors such as Julianna Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Love Actually) and Michael, only appear briefly in the movie but their presence are extremely important aspects to the flow of the whole story. And with the long takes that Alfonso chose to use, it meant that all scenes had to be well-rehearsed and no NGs could be allowed as that would have destroyed a 6 minute-long take and all the pain that went into orchestrating it. The cast all rose to such an occassion.

Conclusion

It is interesting how the last hope for mankind in the movie was embodied by a girl of African descent. It has been scientifically proven that Africa was where all humans today came from, and when the world was in despair, a miracle and hope emerged yet again from our land of origin.

The ending was beautiful. Reminisent of the words uttered by Miriam, Alfonso ends the movie with a blackout and the title, followed by sounds of children's laughter filling the emptiness. Such is the importance of children in our lives, and Alfonso makes such an intuitive feeling come to life.

I will never look at children the same way again.

Need I say more? A definite must-watch. It changes you.

"Children of Men" - what a meaningful title.


Interesting trivia (from IMDB.com)

In the scene where Miriam (Pam Ferris) is taken off the bus at Bexhill, the camera pans by several cages with prisoners in them. One of the prisoners seen is the infamous "hooded man" from the Abu Ghraib prison torture pictures. He is seen in the exact pose as the real pictures.

When Owen enters the dining room in Battersea power station, the large black and white mural behind him is "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso. The painting was Picasso's expression of disgust over the Nazi bombing of Gernika, Spain during the Spanish Civil War, which killed an estimated 1600 civilians.

Michael Caine plays an award winning political cartoonist. In his house you can see some of his cartoons in the background, these are drawn by Steve Bell, an award winning political cartoonist for The Guardian newspaper.

From the scene where Theo gets off the train in the beginning, many of the service rifles carried by the British armed forces are the XM8 rifle from today's era. The rifle is considered experimental today, with the program canceled in 2005 between US Defense Department and the rifle's manufacturer, Heckler & Koch. The XM8 was intended to replace current US M16/M4 variant service rifles by 2015-2020.

In the car chase scene, just before the car is attacked, Miriam can be seen peeling an orange in the back seat. In films oranges often represent impending danger or tragedy. This motif is also prominently featured in The Godfather.

At Jasper's safe house, Jasper discusses the loss of Theo's youthful son to a flu pandemic. During this scene, the soundtrack plays music from the Kindertotenlieder ("Child Death Songs") by Gustav Mahler, a song lamenting the death of the artist's children.

The line "Shantih, shantih, shantih," which is said first by Miriam over Julian's dead body and then by Jasper when he finds out Kee is pregnant, is the final line of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, a poem that deals with the theme of infertility in the post-World War I world. Originally from the Hindu Upanishads it roughly translates to "the peace that passes understanding."

The name Theophilus (Theo's name) is derived from Greek: "Theos" means "god" and "philos" means "friend". Thus the name would mean "friend of god".

When Miriam is taken off the bus in the refugee camp you can hear the song "Arbeit Macht Frei" by The Libertines. "Arbeit macht frei," meaning "Work shall set you free," was written above the entrance at all of the major Nazi concentration camps.