Children of Men

Reviewed by Alicia Glass
December 27, 2006

Director: Alfonso Cuaron Studio: Strike MPAA: R Website: Click Here Review Rating: 8 out of 10

Clide Owen and Claire-Hope Ashitey (background) in Children of Men . Courtesy Strike.

A post-apocalyptic future where humanity is on the verge of extinction, as women are infertile and no more children are being born at all.

The movie starts off with the national broadcast of the death of the youngest person in the world, at age 18. This more or less sets the tone for the whole movie, a kind of bleak irony. Clive Owen's character Theodore Faron is a former activist who is contacted by his estranged wife with a dangerous secret mission that holds the future of the human race: get Kee, the first pregnant woman in twenty years, to a safe stronghold far away and not get killed or captured in the process.

Michael Cane's character Jasper Palmer is a wonderfully funny and helpful old hippie stoner. A close friend of Theo's, Jasper lays out Theo's life story in a gentle, unstoppable way, as natural and understandably destructive as a flood. Julianne Moore, who plays Theo's estranged wife Julian Taylor, does a fair job for the part given to her. She seems more concerned about getting Kee to where the pregnant woman needs to go, than smoothing old wounds between her and Theo. And hey, with global concerns like the continued survival of humanity, who can blame her. The pregnant woman herself, Kee, played by Claire-Hope Ashitey, isn't quite what you'd expect. She curses, she kicks, she fights and she has a sense of humor. As evidenced by a scene where, being chased by freedom fighters, the government and many others, explosions going on all around them, she tells Theo she wants to name her baby Bazooka. (Bearing in mind, Bazuka is a perfectly fine name for a girl, in Africa.)

The movie itself is very epic without giving ANY particular message to the lack of children, whether it is religious or political or any other. That just doesn't matter, all that matters is the survival of humanity. Which is evidenced in a hugely climactic scene, where Theo and Kee and her newborn baby girl are trapped in a warehouse with gunfire from varying factions all around, explosions going off, and no way out. Kee makes the ultimate decision to simply walk out the front door, guided by Theo, and the fighting everywhere they walk just stops. Hardened soldiers, freedom fighters who've committed atrocities that haunt their dreams, misplaced homeless, and many others all stop and stare at the young woman holding a baby. Many of them cry, a few actually faint, and many of them reach out to touch the young mother and child like the procession was absolutely holy. That was what made the movie for me.

Forget the politics, the religious implications, or any other argumentative problem you might have with this movie, and watch Children of Men for good acting, marvelous locations, and a beautifully devastating plot.