Children of Men is a distopian movie, about a world where no woman has given birth for 18 years. It contains the most powerful scene I’ve ever seen on film. Kee, a young black woman is going into labour on a bus at the entrance way of a refugee camp. We’re watching her fighting the contractions and out the window we see refugees being tortured by the police.
What made this sequence so powerful was not that it showed us a distopian future, but that it showed us our distopian present. The images of refugees who are selected as dangerous at the entrance to the campis deliberately evocative of photos we’ve all seen from Abu Grahib. The camp they then enter is Gaza with British signage. The most potent political comment, in this amazingly political film, was the message refugees heard as they entered the hell-hole of a refugee camp: “Do not support terrorism, we are here to help you.”
The set, and the world-creation, is truly remarkable in its detail, and there’s barely a frame that doesn’t contain information about the world of the film, and criticism of our world.
What makes Children of Men’s critique of our world so radical and thorough- is it takes the world that is usually hidden from those of us who live comfortably, the experiences of Iraqis, palestinians, illegal immigrants and so on, and makes it the centre-piece of Britain’s future. Our government’s are as racist and as brutal as the world, but at the moment they can hide it from a good portion of their population.
I did have a minor problem with the movie, and that was it’s characters – or lack thereof. It is a really sign of the quality of the movie that the fact that the major characters are completely unmemorable is a minor problem rather than a reason to demand my money back. While some of the minor characters were well drawn, the main characters – particularly Theo and Kee very under-developed. This was probably a deliberate choice, which would have worked better if they hadn’t given Theo a back-story from cliche hell (guess what? It involves a girl).
One of the reasons that the movie can sustain characters who don’t hold your interest, is because it is incredibly well-paced. Like Theo we are taken, a little bit reluctantly, along a series of events we have no control over, and we don’t know what’s coming next. I get very jumpy in action movies (actually I got jumpy in Happy Feet), and my friend Betsy grabbed my hand to reassure me that it was OK. Then, once they reached the refugee camp I grabbed her hand, and it turns out that we really needed that.
Children of Men is full of horrors, but it does offer us hope. I may write more about it’s politics of change. But for me, the hope didn’t come from the Human Project, a For me, the hope wasn’t about the group that Kee was trying to reach – an organisation we knew nothing about. The hope came from watching people who kept fighting for a better world, even though they had no reason to believe that anyone would be alive to live in it.
I do recommend this movie, it is an astonishing piece of film-making. It wouldn’t have stayed with me so much, if it wasn’t real. We must fight for a world where women don’t have to give birth in these situations.
Wow! This sounds like a very loose adaptation from the novel (which I loathed for its crappy politics). That’s good.
I always wonder how dystopian movies are received by people in general–I mean, they seem simultaneously to both appeal to and assuage anxieties about our time. Not only because the good guys generally win but also because we can reassure ourselves that what happens here, in front of us, is not as bad as that. It’s also a way to get the exciting frisson of Big Dramatic World Events without also having to see real people suffer…I just tend to wonder about the political effect of movies that rely so much on metaphor.
On another note, this movie seems particularly zeitgeisty because of the “think of the children” part.
It occurs to me that most dystopias hold utopia inside them–the utopia of knowing the answer. The good guys are obviously good and the bad guys are obviously bad, at least in a general sense, even though a standard plot device is the ambiguous good/bad figure. Politics kind of fall away in a dystopia–at least politics in terms of legislation, community organizing, long-term strategy, boring recurring protests, petitions, etc. (Politics become exciting…I guess you could say) And in some dystopias (I’m thinking of Nalo Hopkinson’s very interesting novel Brown Girl in the Ring, for example) the collapse of society means a more defeatable villain. There’s no more massive state with police apparatus and prisons, no more schools, no more temptation to sell out and join the bourgeoisie; there’s only a small local villain scrabbling to maintain his evil control. Things may be awful in that kind of dystopia, but another world is a lot more possible than it appears in our world.
Which is not to criticize the form–it’s a lot more interesting to ask why these things make dystopias appealing to people.
To return to Children of Men, what did you think about its racial politics? It was interesting to me that the mother-of-the-future character was a woman of color, although I have no idea how to interpret that since I (of course) haven’t seen the movie.
I think I may actually see it since it sounds so interesting, although so many widely-distributed movies reduce me to hapless rage that I don’t see a lot of them.
I saw it. It was pretty good. I liked the old man who was the Theo’s friend (I never remember names of movie characters).
The only part that I didn’t like was the end. It was rather abrupt, or maybe I just wanted more resolution.
I saw the movie alone, and I’ve been really intersted to hear what others make of it. I found it very powerful, for many of the reasons you note. I agree that the main characters could have been better developed, but that wasn’t what bothered me about the film.
Mostly, I just found it incredibly hard to watch. Yes, there’s some struggle to survive in the main characters (in that sense, it’s hopeful), but it was very unsettling nonetheless. I liked the fact that there was a complexity to the political situation, and although the problems with the racism, violence, and jailing of immigrants were horrible, the resistance movements didn’t seem to be entirely good either. I would highly recommend this movie, but I would warn you to be prepared to be unsettled (and try not to see it alone–I really wanted to talk to someone afterwards!)
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SPOILERS IN THIS POST. I’M ASSUMING PEOPLE WHO READ THE COMMENTS MOSTLY SAW THE MOVIE, BUT FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T DON’T READ THIS POST DAMMIT!!!!!!! I’M WRITING THIS IN CAPS TO MAKE MY EMPHASIS CLEAR.
I loved the ending. The lack of resolution was important for two reasons – first the movie is really Theo’s story, so what happens after he dies is separate from the story and secondly, it serves to remind us that we don’t know if things get resolved. For all we know the Human Project doesn’t exist, and Key and her baby don’t even survive. Or maybe everything turns out ok, but the only certainty is that Key and her baby wouldn’t survive if they didn’t escape.
Regarding Theo’s death – I think that’s one of the most important aspects of the film. I realized after watching the film that Theo does not pick up a gun in the entire movie. But his hands aren’t clean. He does what he needs to do to protect – he smacks those two off the bike and he bashes Syd’s head in with a concrete block, so he is noble, but the nature of his need to still participate in the violence of the world means that he has no place in the world he helped to create. It’s really rather in line with a more Eastern concept of a hero, and the movie that most came to mind from it is The Seven Samurai. Key and her baby are the only ones who can be part of a new world because they have no hand in the violence of the old.
In that concept the film is primarily anti-violence. But the other concept of the film I thought was fascinating was the Fish. The Fish are first presented as being noble, and their cause is still sympathetic even when they themselves are show to be villains. It made me think of the old adage where the cause must serve the people, not the other way around. (and on a side note – how about that line “I had a sister once.” What a powerful and humanizing line that was!)
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Also Michael Caine was great. As always.
Frowner – the racial politics of the film were position in a world of racist immigration policies – the basic plot and world of the movie was a thorough critique of racist immigration policy. Kee is an illegal immigrant, and if the govenrment find out she has a baby they’ll give it to a rich black family instead.
Has the whole world gone mad! Children of Men is the worst movie ever made. It’s as disappointing as it is distopian. Within 15 minutes we knew we were in for a rough ride. The characters were vapid, the dialogue empty and you couldn’t care less if they lived or died.
I love the scene where Theo, Kee and the midwife were fleeing their captors and the car didn’t start. Little Miss Sunshine in the year 2027. Another doozy is when Theo and Kee were about to walk through a tunnel to take them to the boat wittily called “Tomorrow” (ugh!) when we suddenly hear horror flick music. Here are some other words that start with dis to describe this movie… discordant, discrepant, disharmonic, disharmonious and dissonant. It stinks.
It’s easy to target governments, corporations and other organizations for our misery when the power to change is often in our own hands. Movies that try to hammer you over the head with themes of social injustice without any decent dialogue that encourages THINKING or well developed characters you make you CARE about them is emptiness. Some mythic organization breaking through the fog on a boat called “Tomorrow” won’t save us. Constructive dialogue, thinking and caring will.
Did anyone else not notice that Kee was starving her baby? There were three major opportunities in this movie for her to be feeding that baby and not once did she. I’m not asking for them to be obvious and highlight breast feeding in the film, but they could have discreetly done it or implied it. Every mother knows when a baby is born, the natural instinct (especially in that situation – giving birth in a dingy room with no formula or bottles or medical attention available) would have been to put the baby to her breast. When the baby was crying and couldn’t stop, she should have put it to her breast. When they were on that boat and Theo told her to put the baby over her shoulder and pat. NO! She should have just put it to her freakin’ breast!
Frowner: Yeah, within about five minutes of the movie’s start, it has almost nothing in common with the book’s plot or characters–some names are reused (Julian, Jasper, Luke, Miriam), and obviously the theme and setting is similar, but that’s about it. And I think it still works, in fact it probably works much better than a faithful adaptation would have, so I didn’t mind at all, but it’s good to know going in that the movie and book are very different stories.
I was glad to have read the book, though, to fill in some of the gaps in the overall situation (the Omegas, for example, aren’t explained much, but they’re in there more or less–I assume the nearly catatonic young man at the cousin’s dining table was meant to be an Omega?). They changed the Quietus from an event to a kit you can buy–the attendant advertising is a nice creepy touch–and there’s a very post-Diana scene of mourning for “baby Diego” in the first few minutes, that couldn’t be in the book published in the mid-1990s, for obvious reasons.
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