Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

‘Children of Men’: Movie labors to bring its ideas to life

A lot of big ideas are tossed into the blender in “Children of Men.”

Too many, in fact.

The premise will be catnip to fans of the apocalyptic, end-of-humankind film subgenre: Every woman on the planet has gone sterile, which means the current inhabitants of Mother Earth are also its last — and that icy fact is making everyone a little nuts.

But director Alfonso Cuaron, who worked with four others in co-writing the script from a P.D. James novel, also lets stand a frustrating number of holes, inconsistencies and muddled subplots that grow maddening as the film rolls along, capped by an ending that feels like it arrives about 10 minutes too soon.

The movie opens in London in late 2027, some 18 years after the last human birth. The rest of the world, it seems, is already in flames, but Britannia has kept her stiff upper lip and soldiered on by virtue of having turned her entire island into a vast bastion of fascism in the sainted name of homeland security.

Would-be immigrants are branded fugitives, or “fugies,” hunted down like cockroaches and herded into cages like rats for torture and deportation. (Just to drive home the Holocaust theme, two of the refugees pointedly speak German.)

Amid the palpable despair of people who can see The End bearing down on them, Theo (Clive Owen), a midlevel ministry bureaucrat, finds his only respite in sporadic visits to his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), an aging former political cartoonist and free spirit who grows his own potent pot in a ramshackle house hidden deep in the woods.

One day while leaving work, Theo is abducted and taken to a rendezvous with a long-ago lover, Julian (Julianne Moore). She is now leader of the Fishes, which is either a resistance movement or a terrorist group, depending on how you squint at it.

Julian has a fantastic secret to reveal — the Fishes are guarding a young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) who is eight months pregnant.

Julian wants Theo to use his government connections to secure transit papers to the coast and to smuggle Kee aboard a ship manned by the Human Project, a group of scientists seeking a cure for the infertility pandemic. And thus begins a surreal trek across a blasted wasteland almost — but not completely — devoid of hope.

The production has a very cool look, with touches of futuristic technology amid an almost Victorian layer of filth, decay and grime borne of the inescapable knowledge that there are no future generations for which anything need be preserved.

Cuaron also gooses the mood by shooting the film in nearly monochromatic hues under perpetually leaden skies and by orchestrating action scenes that carry an almost documentary immediacy.

But Owen and Moore, both cool to the point of being cold, have no chemistry — though it hardly matters, since she is killed early in a power struggle within the Fishes that remains hopelessly hazy. Similarly, the Human Project never becomes more than a name, just as the infertility plague itself is never explained.

The lack of any broader context, while clearly a deliberate attempt to focus on the few individuals at the heart of the story, leaves a bit too much to the imagination.

The movie has exactly one truly transcendent scene, when Theo rescues Kee as troops pummel an apartment building teeming with squatters and Fishes.

As Kee’s baby begins to wail, a hush falls over the combatants. In the eerie quiet, Theo and Kee stagger downstairs and outside, passing stunned faces gawking at what clearly is meant to be seen as the second-most-miraculous birth in history.

Of course, a potshot is fired from inside the building, and it all goes fubar again. But for that brief moment, the film achieves a sublime sense of wonder to match its cosmic premise.

If only it had a few more such moments, “Children of Men” might not feel so much like a novel that got a bit lost on the way to the big screen.