Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men Has Only Grown More Resonant in Twenty Years
Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present
Twenty years after its release, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men still cuts deep. Loosely adapted from P.D. James's 1992 novel, the film follows Theo Faron through a Britain that cages refugees and broadcasts propaganda about being the last civilized nation, while humanity has gone eighteen years without a birth. Cuarón deliberately never explains the infertility, narrowing the story to a chase and letting meticulous, documentary-style worldbuilding do the work. The result is speculative fiction that keeps mirroring our present.
All science fiction is political, and all stories about the future are actually about the present.
- Balgair
Watching the movie before kids: Wow, so gritty, so depressing, great worldbuilding, what will become of us?
Watching the movie after kids: My heart is outside of me bleeding on the floor and yet I am still alive and must watch myself suffer forever, this pain that I feel has no place inside me anymore and it burns darkly bright, is this the future my children will have?, what must I do to prevent this for them? I will prevent this for them, as firm as granite I will prevent this, I should have another child and love it and hold it and kiss it and wash it and clean it and smile at it in the warm dark and cozy places of our home and keep a garden with bright red tomatoes and fresh greens and I will feed these children and keep out the bad and the evil and teach them how to survive and love and care and never ever let that world I have just seen come to pass.
- julianpye
I went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.
This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.
- jacquesm
One of the best movies I've ever watched, and one of the few that I could only watch once. It alternates between a gut-wrenching view of a very plausible future and scenes that have you sitting on the edge of your chair. To call it roller coaster would be an understatement.
If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.
- siavosh
I think I dragged my family to see this movie on xmas day, and felt bad for depressing everyone. But it's stayed with me ever since. One scene regularly comes to mind, the one where the rich guy's kid is just on some futuristic version of the iPhone at dinner. Too real.
Also the fact that humans mysteriously lost the ability to have children always seemed to me some unimaginable sci-fi trope, but given many countries now have negative population growth, I can see that too is very real. Growing pockets of humanity where entire towns have more old people than young.
- Danox
Great movie. I was getting all nice and comfy watching it when Julianne Moore’s character had an unfortunate circumstance, (right out of the blue) it is probably Clive Owens best role, all the city scenes were very well done and all city civil war scenes were top notch, Alfonso Cuarón the director/writer did a fantastic job.
I remember thinking that if you ever wanted to portray what war was like on the eastern front with the Germans and the Russians Alfonso Cuarón is your man at the time, watching a movie I didn’t know who he was but he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did a great job.
- trevithick
This is a great movie. There's more tension in the low-speed car chase scene than any high-speed chase I've ever watched.
- hi41
I saw the movie soon after it came on Netflix. At that time, Netflix would mail the DVD. I found the movie soon after interesting back then but thought population collapse could never happen given the size of world population. Now I see so many countries in Europe where the population is decreasing and they need to shutdown schools because of low count of students. I remembered Children of Men and how prescient it was. I feel the same about the movie Her. We will be so lonely that it will no longer be shocking to have fall madly in love with an AI bot and mourn when the bot gets shutdown on the cloud somewhere.
- abhiyerra
The last couple of years I have felt like we are converging on a Brave New World, meets 1984, meets Children of Men, meets cyberpunk...