Children of Men: SOYLENT GREEN IS BABIES

For the record, I really liked this film. Alfonso Cuaron has proved himself a talented director who can obviously craft an interesting portrayal of mankind’s possible future, a daunting feat, to say the least. Clive Owen, Michael Caine, and Claire-Hope Ashitey do exceptional representations of tired guy, hopeful guy, and savior of the people, respectfully. Let’s see, what else? Lots of tension, smart editing, neat details* that will make you do that “Oh riiiight, that bombed-out foxhole used to be a convenience store, I get it,” thing, and lots of hope that no matter how bad the future gets, things will come around, for sure!

I wish I could wrap it up right there, because really, that’s as far as I can get with the good points. Call me crazy, but I can’t fully get behind a film that is entirely lacking in that unfortunately necessary aspect of filmmaking, what the ancients called “story.”

Sure, there’s a premise. The world has gone nuts in the last twenty years, and people have simply lost the ability to reproduce. Using a classic technique of futuristic filmmakers, Cuaron plants some peripheral news stories and advertisements, from which we glean a couple of explanatory details: other major cities are toast, Britain perseveres, and the government hands out suicide kits in case it all gets too, too terrible. The rest of the world wants to live in England but England resists, and the subsequent fighting allows Cuaron to create a grey and black rubble-filled landscape, reminiscent of a post-blitzkrieg Europe. In the least surprising surprise ever, somebody gets pregnant for the first time in eighteen years and has to be kept safe.

So what’s the lesson here? We’re being punished by infertility because…what? We didn’t take care of the environment? We had some sort of plague? We didn’t eat organic food? We didn’t love one another? Even those semi-lame reasons would be better than nothing, which is what Children of Men gives us. A whole lot of nothing. No reasons, no purpose, no solution. There are good people and bad people, but we’re not told why the good are good and the bad are bad. There’s chaos and destruction, but we don’t know how it started and we certainly don’t know how Britain was spared.**

Basically, the film tells us that if we’re not careful, our future could turn really bleak really fast (the characters constantly hint that the decline began somewhere around 2007, implying to the 2007 captive audience that we should act fast before the despair is upon us!), and boy, I would almost be convinced if I knew what we’re supposed to be careful about.

For a film that looks really cool and has you on the edge of your seat and all that, the Google image search for "children of men" reveals a whole lot of pictures of people just talking to each other.

It doesn’t help that I just read The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), which also deals with a future gone to rot due to infertility and an effed up social system. Reasons for this are eventually made clear – reliance on chemicals, xenophobia, and a feminist movement that was used and twisted beyond all recognition. The consequences, though lacking in explosions and grit, are much more terrifying, the more so because we can actually see attitudes and behaviors in our present moving towards a future that doesn’t seem so fictional anymore. Next to great works like A Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 28 Days Later and even 12 Monkeys, Children of Men is ultimately empty and soulless. Even Soylent Green was more motivating because, I’m sorry, no matter how much it would blow to live in a world with no new life, it would blow way, way more to have to eat Grandpa.

*However, specks of blood on the camera lens immediately negate suspension of disbelief. If someone is hiding behind that pile of dirt with Clive Owen and filming his distress, why isn’t he being helped by the cameraman, etc. etc.
**Manners.