Mark Steyn’s latest column highlights a new movie that has been on my list of films to see for the past couple of weeks: Children of Men, loosely based on mystery writer P.D. James’s 1992 novel. The movie is set some twenty years in the future—eighteen years after the last human being was born on the planet.
"The world has collapsed," announces a BBC newsman in a new movie. "Only Britain soldiers on." Europe in 1940? No, 2027. Adapted from P.D. James' dystopian novel, Children Of Men is set on a planet in which humanity is barren. That's to say, it can no longer reproduce. And you'd be amazed at how much else collapses with the fertility rate.
Here’s the trailer for the film, which presents the world of the near-future as a rotting wasteland of hopelessness, ugliness, and fear.
I can’t really remember when I last had any hope, and I certainly can’t remember when anyone else did either. Because, really, since women stopped being able to have babies, what’s left to hope for?
The Globe and Mail gave the film four stars.
Instantly up to speed and powered by that rarest of cinematic fuels — intelligent action — Children of Men is a nativity story for the ages, this or any other. A dazzling pre-credit sequence sets both the fast pace and the dark tone. London, November, 2027, where the skies are grey and the denizens are nervous and terrorist bombs are exploding in Fleet Street shops. Yes, it's a near future that bears an uncanny resemblance to the present, save for the hot story that has the media buzzing: “The youngest person on the planet has just died.” The deceased was 18.
Despite rave reviews, however, the movie is so gloomy that the studio is backing away from it. Says Mark Steyn,
You might have a hard time finding ''Children Of Men'' at your local multiplex. It's a more pertinent Christmas movie this holiday season than ''Bad Santa 3'' or ''The Santa Clause 8,'' but Universal seems to have got cold feet and all but killed the picture.
I am very sad to read that because it means the film almost certainly won’t be shown at all in Whitehorse cinemas, so I won’t get to see it until it comes out on DVD.
The film’s Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron gave an interview to the Globe earlier this week. His movie may be great, but I have to wonder if he himself understands what’s been happening in the world.
"We grew up in a very beautiful world, but my generation — and people older than me — have bungled it. We live in such a hedonistic economy where all that matters is instant economic gratification and economic growth. We didn't care enough about the consequences of that growth.
"I worry about what we're handing over to the next generation," muses Cuaron, who now lives in a hill town in Tuscany with his second wife, Italian cinema critic Annalisa Bugliani. "But still, I'm convinced our youth will be way more evolved than us. They will be the ones — like the Human Project [a group of scientists trying to set things right in the film] — to save us all.
Call me pessimistic, but that’s a load of fanciful (not to say utopian) nonsense. I’ve been hearing that generational buck-passing since the 1960s. When I was a teenager, intellectuals and cultural leaders used to tell us that we were the hope of the future and that we’d be so much more moral and selfless than their generation. It didn’t work out quite that way—rather the opposite, in fact—but now the rhetoric has escalated. Youth will “save us all”. That’s a heavy burden to place on “youth”, especially since the older generation has produced so few of them.
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UPDATE (27 Dec.): Anthony Sacramone of First Things has seen the film and he does not recommend it. Director Cuaron has turned a fine novel into "incoherent propaganda" and "a personal political screed" and systematically stripped it of Christian content and sensibility.
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