Based on a PD James novel, Alfonso Caurón's Children of Men believably portrays a certain kind of society shuffling towards extinction. The human race has been sterile for nearly two decades, affecting a worldwide mindset of total nihilism. Eye-catch news snatches shorthand a variety of global catastrophe, including a throbbing mushroom cloud on the New York skyline. The only country apparently left functioning is mainland Britain, which has devolved into a muddled fascist extermination state.
The frame crowds with rotting cages and temporary internment facilities, full of depressed peoples in the process of liquidation. Wake-up newscasts are preceded by chummy infomercial ads for government issued suicide pills. Grasping terror cells bomb cafés for anti-establishment lip-service. Something terrible has happened in Liverpool. The British populace sleepwalks through the misery, crowding their desks with vile trinkets, and blubbing about celebrity deaths. It's a post-apocalyptic Blitz spirit tempered with an acute emotional repression, and pigheaded inflexibility. Everybody still shuffles into their awful cubicled workplace; despite Bexhill's transformation into a smoking death camp, capital nights are still spent down the pub. While the rest of the world has exited in a rationalised orgy of self-immolation, this country stockpiles works of art and worries if there will be anybody left to appreciate them. Britain maintains. Children of Men is bold and telling where the Wachowski's anaemic adaptation of V for Vendetta, issued the same year, is simply puny.
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