Review

Review Date: 7-January-07
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Children of Men (2006)

"Children of Men" is a unique, inventive thriller which tells a simple, elemental story. I have never seen anything like it, yet have come across its themes time and again. (And not in the P.D. James book from which it springs.) I admire both these qualities of the film, the familiar and the new, and director Alfonso Cuarón's way of integrating them. I imagine some people might find it too complicated or too simple, but I'm already eager to see it again.

The hero of this futuristic odyssey is an Everyman named Theo (Clive Owen, as brilliant as he is beautiful) who is slogging through the last half of his life in a blur of despair. He's not unusual in this condition, for the world has gone to seed since the last baby was born 18 years previous in 2009. Inflicted with global infertility, most of Earth's people have decided to commit suicide, await humanity's finale in misery or religious ecstasy, or go out with a bang of vicious mayhem. Only the fabled minds behind the Human Project, which may or may not exist, are thought to be taking steps toward finding an eleventh-hour solution. Comforted by his single friend, a pot-growing freethinker played by Michael Caine, Theo watches and waits. Until one day he's commandeered by a group of terrorists led by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) to help escort a young woman from London to the coast. A young pregnant woman, the solitary hope of mankind.

What begins for Theo as a small act of nostalgic rebellion becomes a down-and-dirty obstacle course of wild characters, cruel double-crossings, unexpected sacrifices, and escalating violence. (And, most remarkably, humor.) Inspired by both past and future, he focuses his entire energy upon the new mother in his charge (Clare-Hope Ashitey) and does whatever it takes to protect her. He's helped and hunted by a number of desperate souls, notably Chiwetel Ejiofor as a zealot and Pam Ferris as a former midwife, but the quest is fundamentally his. It's like a parent's redemption for the loss of a child (which Theo has suffered) writ large. It's like Tom Cruise's drive to deliver his children from annihilation in "War of the Worlds." It's like a wacky fantasy that isn't quite wacky enough, with its amused fondness for the turn of the century when people believed the end wasn't nigh, and its harrowing images of immigrants being persecuted. It offers a number of subjects for thought and discussion, but its core is very plain. When everyone else sees nothing but death, the hero is he who devotes himself to life.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.