New Year, New Dystopia

Winter is the second big season for cineplex rushes, so I figured the best way to usher in the year was with a movie review.

Since The Fountain, the movie I’d been hearing the most whispers about was Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Now, with the former, I was a little bit disappointed after so much build-up and anticipation. With the latter, perhaps hearing about it so late was the saving grace. Or maybe it just kicked my teeth into what's left of my higher brain functions.

In what the audience is allowed to gather, a future London, England is the last bastion of “civilized” human life, all other notable countries and metropolises in shambles. Wars and terrorist attacks (both nuclear), pollution, even a few vague natural disasters have led to worldwide poverty and strife. But the true issue at the heart of every despair-filled event is a simple ritual of existence, taken for granted after so long: fertility.

The human race has not had a single birth in eighteen years, meaning no new children, meaning no new generations, meaning no future. Needless to say, people go a bit crazy. After the countless other tragedies befalling mankind, every country’s population rips itself apart in civil war. That’s basically the plot. The world is ending, and no one can rise up and save us.

Except Clive Owen.

Alright, that may be pushing it a little. Owen, most well-known in America for his appearances in Closer, Sin City and as the eponymous lead of King Arthur, is the eyes and ears of the audience. He is less the focus of the story, and more its unwitting witness. Detached and broken from his own trauma over the past eighteen years, he is in no mood to be an action hero; he’d much rather drink himself into a coma, except for the fact he has a narrative importance…er, destiny.

Don’t worry, though. Owen’s ghostly behavior is not the focus of the drama. The film is filled to the teeth with heavy action. Gruesome action. Won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children action. I remember comparing the urban fighting between military/police and civilians to the battles of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. And honestly, they are that intense.

Explosions swiftly disrupt calm if hectic urban scenes, and a background extra may be just as likely to pick up a rock and stone a main character as stroll nonchalantly by. Everyone’s depressed, everyone’s angry, and everyone sees everyone else as a potential target. The most horrific and telling detail of this apocalyptic landscape is how many people are indiscriminately injured or outright killed with little time to even register the impact.

The other remarkable feature of this film is how important the set design is. Taking place several decades in the future, there are numerous elements showing us a world distinctly different, if still descended from our world: car designs that look like advancements on current models, but obviously several years off the dealership floor; pervasive streaming advertisements and news programs; all sorts of modern technology with extra data and information flooding out. Clive Owen even has a weathered sweatshirt advertising the 2012 London Olympics.

But unlike recent futurist movies, this is all done in a passing glance, without wide, IMAX shots of how much traffic is on the superhighway. Cuarón’s use of the handheld digital camera increases the audience’s interest in the scenery. Following Owen on the street level, we become more interested in the billboards advertising assisted-suicide medication, the posters encouraging reporting illegal refugees, the religious repenters flagellating themselves in droves.

In the tradition of 28 Days Later, the horror is in how near and overflowing all of this is. A whole world surrounds the characters of the story, but it isn’t one to be celebrated, but feared. If there were any simple message to take from the film, it might be the insidiousness of allowing a government to run rampant in times of crisis (ala V for Vendetta’s cinematic translation), but the more subtle message is the calming effect of innocence. A dominant modern view is that those who are too meek to defend themselves with violence will be consumed by the darker elements of humanity. But perhaps their gentle nature protects them from being consumed spiritually...

There’s no cut and dry victory for the film’s characters, and certainly no critical solutions to any of the events the film prophesizes, but Cuarón does use a wonderfully effective thematic lesson: survive the future, by remembering and honoring the past.

Please, think of the children.