Science Fiction is good for raising difficult questions. It can explore philosophical extremes such as mortality and death, mans fate and indeed the fate of the world. Through writers such as Ian M Banks it can create backdrops on massive scales or it can exist as a kind of one act play in the confines of one room as we find with many Philip K Dick short stories. It can be escapist, prophetic or ominous. Where it works best is when set in a world that is recognisable as a slightly altered version of our own world and Children of Men is just that.
Based on the P D James book of the same name but taking the core idea into new area, we find ourselves in London of a not too near future, it is familiar yet worryingly different. The fabric of society, the clothes, the landmarks, the streets and countryside are all what we would expect to see around us but it is a broken country. Dirt and rubbish fill the streets, and a dark shadow hangs over the land.
Britain as a nation is collapsing, there is a war between a band of rebels supporting immigrant rights and the government who are shutting the borders and deporting any they feel don’t belong. Behind this lies a bigger, potentially catastrophic issue, one, which the film centres on but for the sake of spoiling the film, I will not divulge.
The film opens with Theo Faron(Clive Owen) being caught between the devastating news of a murder and narrowly avoiding being killed in a terrorist attack on a café. His response is one of paralysation and terror and that action tells you all you need to know about the nature of the film. This isn’t going to be one of action heroes and daring do, this is one of everyday people caught in dystopian horror.
Faron is kidnapped by a group of rebels headed by Julian Taylor(Julianne Moore), his former lover who wants to use his influence to smuggle a young girl out to a country safe house. He agrees and they set off on a journey chased through broken streets and deserted countryside chased by police and homeland security and lost in the fracturing machinations of the rebel group. One scene alone is enough to sell this film, a dramatic car chase, shot from inside the vehicle in a single take by one camera and lasting ten minutes. It is claustrophobic, terrifying and stunning.
The film works because it is a believable story set in a recognisable world. Not the futuristic world of hi tech weapons, alien structures and space travel but just a broken and tired not too distant future version of our own society. Characters are struggling rather than heroic, backdrops are decayed rather than overtly dystopian and although fans of the book will find that the film takes a very different path very quickly, on its own terms it is brilliant.
T S Eliot famously wrote “ this is the way the world ends…not with a bang but a whimper” and if that is the case, this is what it will look like.