Children of Men
Children of Men is a 2006 dystopian action thriller film[4][5][6][7] directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón. The screenplay, based on P. D. James' 1992 novel The Children of Men, was credited to five writers, with Clive Owen making uncredited contributions. The film is set in 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Asylum seekers seek sanctuary in the United Kingdom, where they are subjected to detention and refoulement by the government. Owen plays civil servant Theo Faron, who tries to help refugee Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) escape the chaos. Children of Men also stars Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Charlie Hunnam, and Michael Caine.
This article is about the film adaptation. For the original novel, see The Children of Men.Children of Men
- Alfonso Cuarón
- Timothy J. Sexton
- David Arata
- Mark Fergus
- Hawk Ostby
- Iain Smith
- Tony Smith
- Marc Abraham
- Eric Newman
- Hilary Shor
- Álex Rodríguez
- Alfonso Cuarón
- Universal Pictures
(North America)[1] - United International Pictures (International)
- Toho-Towa (Japan)
- 3 September 2006 (Venice)
- 22 September 2006 (United Kingdom)
- 18 November 2006 (Japan)
- 25 December 2006 (United States)
109 minutes[2]
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Japan[3]
English
$76 million[1]
$70.5 million[1]
The film was released by Universal Pictures on 22 September 2006, in the UK and on 25 December in the US. Despite the limited release and lack of any clear marketing strategy during awards season by the film's distributor,[8][9][10] Children of Men received critical acclaim and was recognised for its achievements in screenwriting, cinematography, art direction, and innovative single-shot action sequences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. It was also nominated for three BAFTA Awards, winning Best Cinematography and Best Production Design, and for three Saturn Awards, winning Best Science Fiction Film. In 2016, it was voted 13th among 100 films considered the best of the 21st century by 117 film critics from around the world.
Plot[edit]
In 2027, eighteen years after human activities have caused widespread ecocide, total human infertility, war, and global depression threaten the collapse of human civilizations.[11] The United Kingdom is one of the few remaining nations with a functioning government and has become a police state in which immigrants are arrested and either imprisoned or executed.
Theo Faron, a former activist turned cynical bureaucrat, is kidnapped by the Fishes, a militant immigrant-rights group led by Theo's estranged wife, Julian Taylor; the pair separated after their son's death during a 2008 flu pandemic. Julian offers Theo money to acquire transit papers for a young refugee woman named Kee. Theo obtains the documents from his cousin, a government minister, and agrees to escort Kee in exchange for a larger sum of money. Luke, a Fishes leader, drives Theo, Kee, Julian, and former midwife Miriam towards Canterbury, but an armed gang ambushes them and kills Julian. Two police officers later stop their car; Luke kills them, and the group hides Julian's body before heading to a safe house.
Kee reveals to Theo that she is pregnant, making her the only known pregnant woman in the world. Julian had intended to take her to the Human Project, a scientific research group in the Azores dedicated to curing humanity's infertility, which Theo believes does not exist. Luke becomes the new leader of the Fishes. That night, Theo eavesdrops on a discussion and learns that the Fishes orchestrated Julian's death so that Luke could become their leader and that they intend to kill him and use Kee's baby as a political tool. Theo wakes Kee and Miriam, and they escape to the secluded hideaway of Theo's reclusive, aging hippie friend Jasper Palmer, a former political cartoonist whose wife was tortured into catatonia by the British government for her activism.
The group plans to reach the Human Project ship, the Tomorrow, scheduled to arrive offshore at Bexhill, a notorious immigrant detention centre. Jasper plans to use Syd, an immigration officer to whom Jasper sells cannabis, to smuggle them into Bexhill as refugees, from where they can take a rowing boat to rendezvous with the Tomorrow. The next day, the Fishes discover Jasper's house, forcing the group to flee. Jasper stays behind to stall them and is murdered by Luke as Theo watches. Theo, Kee, and Miriam meet with Syd, who helps them board a bus to the camp. When Kee begins experiencing contractions, Miriam distracts a guard by feigning religious mania and is taken away.
Inside the camp, Theo and Kee meet a Romani woman, Marichka, who provides a room where Kee gives birth to a baby girl. The next day, Syd tells Theo and Kee that war has broken out between the British military and the refugees and that the Fishes have infiltrated the camp; he then reveals that Theo and Kee have a bounty on their heads and attempts to capture them. Theo subdues Syd with Marichka's help; they escape but are ambushed by the Fishes, who capture Kee and the baby. Theo tracks them to an apartment building that is under heavy fire. Theo confronts Luke, who is killed in an explosion, and Theo escorts Kee and the baby out. Awed by the baby, the British soldiers and Fishes temporarily stop fighting and allow the trio to leave. Marichka leads them to the boat but stays behind as they depart.
As British fighter jets conduct airstrikes on Bexhill, Theo and Kee row to the rendezvous point in heavy fog. Theo reveals that he was shot and wounded by Luke earlier; he teaches Kee how to burp her baby, and she tells him she will name the baby girl Dylan, after Theo's and Julian's lost son. Theo smiles weakly, then loses consciousness as the Tomorrow approaches. As the screen cuts to black, children's laughter is heard.
Themes[edit]
Hope and faith[edit]
Children of Men explores the themes of hope and faith[54] in the face of overwhelming futility and despair.[55][29] The film's source, P. D. James' novel The Children of Men (1992), describes what happens when society is unable to reproduce, using male infertility to explain this problem.[56][57] In the novel, it is made clear that hope depends on future generations. James writes "It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words 'justice', 'compassion', 'society’, 'struggle', 'evil', would be unheard echoes on an empty air."[58]
The film does not explain the cause of the infertility, although environmental destruction and divine punishment are considered.[29][59][60] Cuarón has attributed this unanswered question (and others in the film) to his dislike for purely expository film: "There's a kind of cinema I detest, which is a cinema that is about exposition and explanations ... It's become now what I call a medium for lazy readers ... Cinema is a hostage of narrative. And I'm very good at narrative as a hostage of cinema."[61] Cuarón's disdain for back-story and exposition led him to use the concept of infertility as a "metaphor for the fading sense of hope".[61][59] The "almost mythical" Human Project is turned into a "metaphor for the possibility of the evolution of the human spirit, the evolution of human understanding".[62] Cuarón believed that explaining things such as the cause of the infertility and the Human Project would create a "pure science-fiction movie", removing focus from the story as a metaphor for hope.[63][59] Without dictating how the audience should feel by the end of the film, Cuarón encourages viewers to come to their own conclusions about the sense of hope depicted in the final scenes: "We wanted the end to be a glimpse of a possibility of hope, for the audience to invest their own sense of hope into that ending. So if you're a hopeful person you'll see a lot of hope, and if you're a bleak person you'll see a complete hopelessness at the end."[26]
Religion[edit]
Richard Blake, writing for Catholic magazine America, suggested that like Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's The Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the crux of the journey in Children of Men lies in what is uncovered along the path rather than the terminus itself.[33] Ethan Alter, reviewing the film for Film Journal International, describes Theo's heroic journey to the coast as mirroring his personal quest for "self-awareness",[64] a journey that takes him from "despair to hope."[65]
According to Cuarón, the title of P. D. James' book (The Children of Men) is an allegory derived from a passage of scripture in the Bible.[66] (Psalm 90 (89):3 of the King James Version: "Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men") James refers to her story as a "Christian fable"[56] while Cuarón describes it as "almost like a look at Christianity": "I didn't want to shy away from the spiritual archetypes", Cuarón told Filmmaker Magazine. "But I wasn't interested in dealing with dogma."[26]
Release[edit]
Box office[edit]
Children of Men had its world premiere at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2006.[86] On 22 September 2006, the film debuted at number 1 in the United Kingdom with $2.4 million in 368 screens.[87] It debuted in a limited release of 16 theaters in the United States on 22 December 2006, expanding to more than 1,200 theaters on 5 January 2007.[88] As of 6 February 2008, Children of Men had grossed $69,612,678 worldwide, with $35,552,383 of the revenue generated in the United States.[89]
Home media[edit]
The HD-DVD and DVD were released in Europe on 15 January 2007[90] and in the United States on 27 March 2007. Extras include a half-hour documentary by director Alfonso Cuarón, entitled The Possibility of Hope (2007), which explores the intersection between the film's themes and reality with a critical analysis by eminent scholars: the Slovenian sociologist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek, anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein, environmentalist futurist James Lovelock, sociologist Saskia Sassen, human geographer Fabrizio Eva, cultural theorist Tzvetan Todorov, and philosopher and economist John N. Gray. "Under Attack" features a demonstration of the innovative techniques required for the car chase and battle scenes; in "Theo & Julian", Clive Owen and Julianne Moore discuss their characters; "Futuristic Design" opens the door on the production design and look of the film; "Visual Effects" shows how the digital baby was created. Deleted scenes are included.[91] The film was released on Blu-ray Disc in the United States on 26 May 2009.[92]
Reception[edit]
Critical response[edit]
Children of Men received critical acclaim; on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 92% approval rating based on 252 reviews from critics, with an average rating of 8.10/10. The site's critical consensus states: "Children of Men works on every level: as a violent chase thriller, a fantastical cautionary tale, and a sophisticated human drama about societies struggling to live."[93] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 84 out of 100, based on 38 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[94] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "B−" on an A+ to F scale.[95]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, writing, "Cuarón fulfills the promise of futuristic fiction; characters do not wear strange costumes or visit the moon, and the cities are not plastic hallucinations, but look just like today, except tired and shabby. Here is certainly a world ending not with a bang but a whimper, and the film serves as a cautionary warning."[96] Dana Stevens of Slate called it "the herald of another blessed event: the arrival of a great director by the name of Alfonso Cuarón". Stevens hailed the film's extended car chase and battle scenes as "two of the most virtuoso single-shot chase sequences I've ever seen".[71] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film a "superbly directed political thriller", raining accolades on the long chase scenes.[80] "Easily one of the best films of the year" said Ethan Alter of Film Journal International, with scenes that "dazzle you with their technical complexity and visual virtuosity".[64] Jonathan Romney of The Independent praised the accuracy of Cuarón's portrait of the United Kingdom, but he criticized some of the film's futuristic scenes as "run-of-the-mill future fantasy".[35] Film Comment's critics' poll of the best films of 2006 ranked the film number 19, while the 2006 readers' poll ranked it number two.[97] On their list of the best movies of 2006, The A.V. Club, the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, and The Washington Post placed the film at number one.[98] Entertainment Weekly ranked the film seventh on its end-of-the-decade top 10 list, saying, "Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian 2006 film reminded us that adrenaline-juicing action sequences can work best when the future looks just as grimy as today".[99]
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone ranked it number two on his list of best films of the decade, writing: