How is children of men a dystopia

Why should it be, since the film both imitated and foretold the norms and methods of existing liberal democracy? Scenes of hooded prisoners recall the abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib during the war on terror. And the infertility crisis is an extreme projection of what the future could hold for countries with falling birth rates, such as Japan, Russia, Singapore and South Korea.

Kee is the antithesis of almost everything that modern societies venerate and forgive: the rich, the male, the rooted, the documented. This point is reinforced with crushing irony when viewed against the backdrop of the Covid crisis. The Brexit-style jingoism is familiar, perhaps even mundane, after a decade of Conservative government. So much for soldiering on. This is the failure of political imagination. The way the film extrapolates from the here and now is the reason the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher thought Children of Men was unique.

There is no desire to create alternate ways of living, or to make the end of times less awful. In Children of Men , however, the failure of the medical sciences to discover a cure for infertility seems to have stripped humanity of all resolve and Promethean ambition. Fisher was right to highlight the relationship between capitalism and authoritarian politics in the film; how the public square has been abandoned — actually and metaphorically — and the state stripped back to its military and police functions.

In other films about the apocalypse, such as Mad Max , global ruin invites a kind of dark liberation, when survivors embrace sex, drugs, racing, fighting and looting.

But in Children of Men , Britain limps on and its citizens limp on in it. Ironically, they have broken into the refugee prison to make it to safety heard of this recent true story? The refugee camp is out of the way of the regular folk and cities. It is a place where refugees are dumped, searched, tortured and left with nothing, forced to create their own slum society — a situation that sounds all too similar to how Australia is currently treating refugees. Despite being live human beings in a world where infertility has meant that no new children have been born in 18 years, their human status is of no concern because they come from somewhere else.

It may feel like an extreme example, one where a corrupt government is actively keeping its citizens, especially the rich, safe and the refugees out. A government concurrently holding contrasting beliefs regarding the worth of human beings - children good, refugees bad. This is the present. Instead, what is precious to the government is maintaining control, not human dignity or even the preservation of humanity.

In the world of this film, babies represent hope and the future, but adults and even older children represent possible dissenters. What I hope this movie does is remind us of the preciousness of life. We are precious simply because we are human, because we are made in the image of God - all of us, no matter our faith, country of origin or any other number of factors.

I believe this movie can help us think about the experience of others, and about what people will do to protect and help each other. The film, in hindsight, seems like a documentary about a future that, in , finally arrived. In , however, the film was a commercial flop.

At Oscar time, it was largely overlooked, earning three nominations but none for acting, directing, or for Best Picture. Its studio, Universal, never quite figured out how to sell it — an astoundingly bleak sci-fi picture devoid of fun gadgets or futuristic set design, in which Julianne Moore, the most marketable star, gets shot dead 28 minutes in.

It debuted at the Venice Film Festival on September 3, , and received a standing ovation, but by the time it had its U. Now, in , Children of Men is having a remarkable resurgence — not just because of its tenth anniversary but because of its unsettling relevance at the conclusion of this annus horribilis.

Theo sleepwalks through a decaying London until his past as a progressive activist catches up to him, literally, in the person of his radical ex-wife, Julian Julianne Moore. Hard up for cash, Theo agrees.

A grueling Via Dolorosa ensues, in which Theo and a hippie midwife named Miriam Pam Ferris race to get Kee to a ship piloted by the Human Project, a secretive science collective devoted to ending infertility. As the camp explodes, Theo and Kee escape in a flimsy rowboat. Before the rescuing ship arrives, a gut-shot Theo slumps dead in the rowboat. He, like us, never finds out whether the world is saved. One cataclysmic event had tilted the world off its axis, and chaos loomed.

That weird tale about global infertility lit up in his brain. He and Sexton decided they would throw out nearly everything but the character names, the English setting, and the concept of the first pregnancy in a barren era.

They got the go-ahead from the producers, Eric Newman and Marc Abraham, who had been shepherding the adaptation. First, they went to the scene of the crime, the still-smoldering New York City. Finally, they decamped to London to finish the first draft of their script. The response was apprehensive at best.

Nobody ever comes back from a franchise. I was in London full-time, going through not the prettiest side of London. His radical spirit is rekindled when he is contacted or rather kidnapped by his long-lost love, Julian Julianne Moore , the leader of an anti-government resistance movement.

If the plot harks back to two classic fictions of the s, Casablanca and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the setting is breathtakingly contemporary. Ring any bells? After eight years, British borders will remain closed. The deportation of illegal immigrants will continue. Actually, we talked about being the anti-Blade Runner in the sense of how we were approaching reality. The sparse futuristic embellishments, such as the video billboards, are already moving from science-fiction to science-fact.