Ahh, the Sixties. The dope was great, the people were groovy, the music had a conscience, and everything would have been all right, man, if only the fascist pigs hadn't screwed it all up. CHILDREN OF MEN, supposedly a science fiction movie, is the most backward-looking film I've seen in a long time.
In the world of the future, the conservatives won. They had their wars, they polluted their planet, and they blew it. Now, Mother Nature is exacting her revenge by wiping out the human race through the infertility of its women, and the only thing standing between us and human extinction is a sold-out ex-yippie; an idealistic hippie; and the personification of Earthly fecundity, a pregnant young African woman named, obviously enough, Kee. In the world of the present, the bores won.
What is it about the '60s countercultural movement that so captures the creative imagination of generations too young to remember it? Director Alfonso Cuarón was born in Mexico City in 1961, so he wasn't even around for the really good stuff. Nevertheless, the film's moral center (played by an always-engaging Michael Caine) is a guy for whom time stopped in 1969. He grows his weed, he listens to his Beatles records, and he cares for his invalid wife (crushed under the boot of The Man, of course) in an eco-friendly home that's safely tucked away from the horrors of the outside world. Here's the thing, however: if the movie's set in 2027 and the Caine character is 74 years old, that means that he has dedicated his life to a world that moved along when he was twenty years old. It's as if I decided to dedicate my life to the Reagan '80s and moved my family to a country house where I could revel in supply-side economics and Devo music 'til the end of my days. It's crazy. It doesn't make sense. In the world of CHILDREN OF MEN, it's about the best possible thing a man can do.
Anachronistic ideology aside, CHILDREN OF MEN is a decent chase thriller with the requisite twists and set pieces. Though it criminally misuses Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Sean Bean role and its denoument clunks like the shed chains of the Liberated, it does have some magnficent bits and it does move along. Now if we could just get a science fiction movie set in the future.
