Count-Down to Dystopia

Children of Men Directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Alfonso Cuarón is not a virtuoso, although his Children of Men style might convince the politically obtuse that a decorative illustration of their social alarm is a visionary achievement. Below the garish surface of this paranoid fantasy lies political antipathy—not the sort of soulful detritus of Tarkovsky’s Stalker tableaux or Spielberg’s hallucinogenic War of the Worlds, but Cuarón’s cheap specialty: fashion. By distorting contemporary social fears into facile apocalyptic imagery, Children of Men does little more than rework the ludicrous, already-forgotten V for Vendetta.

But V for Vendetta relied too much on history (especially Britain’s Guy Fawkes legend, which made it remote to American moviegoers). Here, Cuarón uses the canniest youth bait—focusing on the near-future. This cautionary sci-fi tale is set in London, the year 2027, when the world has gone dystopian. Humans no longer procreate, so the death of a young person shocks news broadcasts as a count-down to the race’s extinction. Can’t get more Worst-Case Scenario than that.

Instead of the cartoon jokiness that vitiated V for Vendetta, Cuarón caters to cynicism about global conditions. Those who felt that the world slipped away from them after the 2000 presidential election and later with the events of 9/11, will see their dread visualized here. Journalist Theodore Faron (caffeine-haggard Clive Owen) embodies their fear and sanctimony as he traverses the trash-strewn, gang-filled streets of Cuarón’s London, walking past neo-concentration camps, evoking WWII or Bosnia or the United States-Mexico border—take your pick. He’s witness to sly evocations of both al-Qaeda terrorism and Homeland Security crackdowns, and underground rebels abduct him and ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore)—who may be either illegal-immigrant freedom fighters or fascist henchmen. But then Cuarón adds a sanctimonious twist: a mock virgin-birth by a Third-World woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), whose delivery and protection becomes Theo’s neo-white man’s burden. You can’t get more Lefty sentimental than that.

Cuarón treats this exaggerated state of the world as a genre exercise. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski does long Steadicam takes through bombed-out neighborhoods and on motorway shoot-outs that resemble the surreally distanced, uninterrupted viewpoint of a videogame. But these show-offy sequences come 16 years after Scorsese and De Palma pioneered them in GoodFellas and Bonfire of the Vanities. They’re done to impress, yet are so slow and stagey that they’re portentous. Children of Men never explains how the world got this way and so its dread is convincingly sophomoric—as is Theo’s reluctant heroism.

The political antipathy of Iraq war protestors and War on Terror skeptics is what drives this pretentious action flick. It panders to a decadent yearning for apocalypse as if to confirm recent fear and resentment about loss of political power. V for Vendetta’s mistake was not recognizing that a sense of self-righteous self-annihilation was the new mood. And Cuarón, a true hack, is nothing if not market-savvy. His dystopia evokes the zombie film 28 Days Later, then jacks things up to resemble Elem Klimov’s disasters of war in Come and See.

Children of Men is only deep on its surface. Cuarón cannot edit scenes for rhythm or real feeling, which is what separates his eschatological set pieces from the wit of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Minority Report or Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers—films that treated the experience of social collapse as personal, rather than a game. Fact is, Children of Men is too smug to be Orwellian or even satirical. Cuarón combines dread and lack of affect, then gets sentimental. Note his maudlin final shot of a ship christened “Tomorrow”; it ought to expose Cuarón to fans who think this film’s visual style is superior to Apocalypto or Minority Report. Those movies had genuine breadth and excitement; Children of Men is delusionary.