Review of Children of Men

Science fiction, the best science fiction, takes the world as we now know it and gives it a twist. Then, the author traces out the implications of the twist and gives us a picture of what that world would look like. Whether it's life on a world with a tiny fraction of Earth's gravity, time travel, the aftermath of a killer virus, humans interacting with robots, faster-than-light space travel or a human raised by aliens, the true genius of the best sci-fi stories is the part where it makes the audience ponder this world that is slightly askew from our own...and forces us to think about our own world.

In Children of Men, this is accomplished beautifully by positing a world where a disease attacked the reproductive systems in humans, making the current generation the last of the human race. Set in England, this is a bleak, dystopian future shows a completely disheartened populace. The youngest man on earth, slightly more than 18 years old, has just died, bombings are rampant and many people take government-provided suicide pills ("guaranteed to work").

And then, a young woman finds herself pregnant.

The central question of the movie is whether what this child represents will be enough to bring hope back to the world. But in this world where mercenaries might be heroes, patriots might only be looking out for their own agendas, and the government might be more interested in getting rid of fugees (refugees) than in this miraculous event, it seems doubtful. The characters themselves are split on what this could mean, one saying flat out that even if fertility returned the next day, it was too late to bring the world back to what it once was while another believes that mere word of this situation will change everything instantly.

I won't tell you who, if either of them, was right.

I will tell you that I was worried that I wouldn't like this movie. I went to see it because, well, it was sci-fi and seemed to have an intriguing premise. But, while I found the scenes dealing with immigration to be heavy-handed, I'm not at all sorry that I saw it.