Movie Review: Children of Men

Based loosely on a P.D. James novel, Children of Men has been marketed as an action movie with a sci-fi style topical premise--fertillity has ended and one pregnant woman is humankind's only hope for survival. Based on the previews, we went in with images of Clive Owen (as heroic rescuer), maybe a car chase or two, some nice cozy explosions...

But this is a much more serious movie than that. Suffused with a dark, post-acopolyptic vision, it throws the viewer off from the very start by setting itself in a London that keeps looking almost familliar--until a cage full of illegal immigrants (who are hunted in the streets) or a dead animal imposes itself on the screen.

In all this dark imagery, some of which disturbingly recalls the Holocaust, Owen and Michael Caine shine. Given a lot of screen time and not a lot of emotion to fill it, Owen does very well and keeps his usual acting style of smouldering-at-camera to a minimum. As his batty friend Jasper, Michael Caine is hilarious and poignant and totally unselfconcious: exactly the kind of work he should always do but sometimes manages to miss the mark on. Julianne Moore, as Owen's freedom fighter ex-wife, is fine as always but criminally underused.

It's not a very happy movie, this one, but it is deeply worth viewing. The images it provides will stay with you a long time: hopefully long enough that we as a society avoid the reality depicted in the film itself, which may be frighteningly closer than we know.

Grade: B +