Children of Men

"Children of Men" is among the most frightening, challenging, thrilling films I have seen in a long, long time.

The message I took away from the film is very much related to the here and now. It's one of the first sci-fi films I've seen that's rife with realism, a disconcerting irony. So in this sense the "plot" was very much secondary for me to the sense that, premise aside, this sort of reality really wasn't that far out of the realm of possibility. Which is to say, the message I took was not of the generic "a child will save them" type, but of the "treat your children well, now" type, since the type of future depicted in the movie may be just around the corner, and could sneak up on us much faster than we think.

["That looks just like Guantanamo," muttered the otherwise demonstrably dense woman sitting behind me, who perhaps didn't notice all of the other troubling elements in the film that either already exist today or that have contemporary parallels..]

From a filmmaking standpoint, I think "Children of Men" has a whole lot in common with "Y Tu Mama Tambien," more than most have noted. In particular I was struck by Cuaron's trust in the audience by dolling out key visual information in the corners and periphery rather than in close-ups. There's a moment in "Y Tu..." where the (wealthy) protagonists drive down a road and see an abandoned dead body just decomposing along the shoulder. That's set in Mexico City today. "Children of Men" depicts a world in the not so distance future where that kind of stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.