Children of Men: The future is a mirror for the present

Watching the movie before kids: Wow, so gritty, so depressing, great worldbuilding, what will become of us?

Watching the movie after kids: My heart is outside of me bleeding on the floor and yet I am still alive and must watch myself suffer forever, this pain that I feel has no place inside me anymore and it burns darkly bright, is this the future my children will have?, what must I do to prevent this for them? I will prevent this for them, as firm as granite I will prevent this, I should have another child and love it and hold it and kiss it and wash it and clean it and smile at it in the warm dark and cozy places of our home and keep a garden with bright red tomatoes and fresh greens and I will feed these children and keep out the bad and the evil and teach them how to survive and love and care and never ever let that world I have just seen come to pass.

I went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.

This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.

One of the best movies I've ever watched, and one of the few that I could only watch once. It alternates between a gut-wrenching view of a very plausible future and scenes that have you sitting on the edge of your chair. To call it roller coaster would be an understatement.

If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.

I think I dragged my family to see this movie on xmas day, and felt bad for depressing everyone. But it's stayed with me ever since. One scene regularly comes to mind, the one where the rich guy's kid is just on some futuristic version of the iPhone at dinner. Too real.

Also the fact that humans mysteriously lost the ability to have children always seemed to me some unimaginable sci-fi trope, but given many countries now have negative population growth, I can see that too is very real. Growing pockets of humanity where entire towns have more old people than young.

Great movie. I was getting all nice and comfy watching it when Julianne Moore’s character had an unfortunate circumstance, (right out of the blue) it is probably Clive Owens best role, all the city scenes were very well done and all city civil war scenes were top notch, Alfonso Cuarón the director/writer did a fantastic job.

I remember thinking that if you ever wanted to portray what war was like on the eastern front with the Germans and the Russians Alfonso Cuarón is your man at the time, watching a movie I didn’t know who he was but he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did a great job.

This is a great movie. There's more tension in the low-speed car chase scene than any high-speed chase I've ever watched.

I saw the movie soon after it came on Netflix. At that time, Netflix would mail the DVD. I found the movie soon after interesting back then but thought population collapse could never happen given the size of world population. Now I see so many countries in Europe where the population is decreasing and they need to shutdown schools because of low count of students. I remembered Children of Men and how prescient it was. I feel the same about the movie Her. We will be so lonely that it will no longer be shocking to have fall madly in love with an AI bot and mourn when the bot gets shutdown on the cloud somewhere.

The last couple of years I have felt like we are converging on a Brave New World, meets 1984, meets Children of Men, meets cyberpunk...

It's a real gem. I've only seen it once, but I still reference this movie at least a couple of times a year. With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline, it only becomes more relevant.

Haha, funny. Do all articles these days end with the appeal to engagement? I shall try it.

A couple of things I like about the film are the fact that babies are wonderful and children are wonderful, even if that world realizes it only through their absence. I think the practice of this is going to be simply people substituting this experience with other things they consider luxuries, and then supporting a shifting tax burden so that the few productive and reproductive carry the weight of the machine.

The shift from relying on one’s own children to take care of one in one’s old age to other people’s children doing so is that fewer people need allocate any of their effort into it. Free-riding off other people’s children is now fairly typical. Simply having paid someone else’s social security isn’t actually good enough. The agreement only worked when you did that and created the means in aggregate for your generation’s social security to be paid for by successors.

But the old parasitise the young in the West (at least, not exclusively). “Tax exemptions for the rich” primarily takes the form of older people just being free of various forms of society’s needs. Already the median French pensioner has a higher income than the median French worker, with the latter eager to try to make his way into the formed class so that he too may transform from the stepped on to the stepper on.

The other thing I like is that the movie is unambiguously hopeful. Kee and her child reach the rescue ship, hurray! Movie’s a bit bleak so nice to have a happy ending.

But I really wonder about what happens afterward. Is it Kee’s responsibility as the only fertile woman to have as many children as she can? Mother of Modern Man she’ll be remembered as. Fun thought.

So what do you think about what the movie implies and about the factors that bias society against the young?

Children of Men was released very early here in Australia. There was very little prior buzz for the movie, almost no advertising at all. Hype was minimal, there was a little bit of buzz from the Venice International Film Festival but it was barely advertised and I had only vaguely known about it in passing based on reading some film discussion forum posts at the time, the concept sounding interesting to me. No one in that discussion had actually seen it.

I didn't even go to the movies to see it specifically, I went for The Departed, but I saw that Children of Men was showing and figured, what the heck.

Imagine going into that movie with zero expectations. I felt shellshocked afterwards. I go online, no one is talking about it. I watched what I still consider one of the greatest movies ever made and over the next few months it's like it doesn't exist.

I did eventually see The Departed, it's pretty great. I think I made the right choice though.

I'm just at beginning of the article, but I immediately have to disagree with something :) "...this remains one of the absolute best sci fi movies of the 21st century."

I'd say it's not just one of the best sci fi movies, it's one of the best movies of the 21st century, period. Definitely one of my all time favorites, despite some of its flaws, it wastes no time, has great pace, is a fully contained story and gets its point across very well. And I'm not even talking about how relevant some of its themes are.

...anyway, back to reading.

Not that it matters but it feels closer to historical fiction than science fiction. Yes, this history happens to be in the future rather than the past, but in either case there is a lot of speculation about a culture or context removed from the present day. I suppose the difference is that there's an implied message of, "this can still happen if we let it" vs assuming that humanity is currently too enlightened to ever fall back into whatever old way of being. It feels like a failing of how we teach history that kids come away from youth thinking things like, "well nazis were bad but that was the olden days, now we all know better."

Interesting how the article is not mentioning the (inverted) Christian allegory as if that doesn't even exist. It's not even subtle if you actually watch the film, like that's almost the point of it.

The original book is even more explicit about that, like Theo does a makeshipt baptism on the infant amidst all the fighting.

Joke and spoiler here: my favorite scene is when the guy needs to navigate the pregnant lady out of the prison, through an ISIS rally barefoot.

The one time in his life, this man was called to do something significant and he didn't even have shoes. Absurd framing.

EDIT: he takes his shoes off and gives them to the pregnant lady. Nuts subtle detail.

Tangent time:

I love Children of Men, I think its dark, prescient, moving and a fantastic technical achievement. Easily one of my top five movies.

I found myself nodding along with everything until I hit these lines:

> Many excellent movies are chase movies! The Terminator (1984) is a chase movie. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is a chase movie. One of the greatest movies ever made (according to me), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is the purest distillation of a chase movie.

Why do people love Fury Road so much? I watched it in the cinema, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was very colorful, had great stunts, etc. A bit derivative of the second and third movie but whatever. George Miller has a format that seems to work. I was shocked when it was nominated for best picture. Best Picture! Years later I listened to a podcast on the making of it, and got a lot of insight into the struggle behind the scenes, and how difficult it was both on set and in pre-production. I had new found respect for everyone involved. I watched it again with new eyes, and... nope. It's fine. It's got some great set-pieces, but I just don't understand the hyperbole. It is, at best, the 3rd best Mad Max movie

One thing not mentioned in the write up, is that there is an animal in (almost) every scene of the film. Guess with no children attentions turned to pets. For me, helped to reflect that humanity continued to want to care, if not for themselves/immigrants/‘others’…

I’ve been saying this for over a decade.

The parallels between that film and the UK as it currently is are harrowing.

I always joked I was going live in a house like Michael Kanes character, only to end up doing it.

A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.

The way the film depicts the treatment of immigrants was what always got me, I would joke (half) just wait till climate change makes southern Europe too hot to live in…

I hate being right!

It's a nativity story; faith overcoming nihilism. Explicitly in the book, obliquely (but frankly obviously) in the film.

I loved that in the movie the high level ranking official, the cousin, works/lives at the Battersea Power Station, the same place in Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover :) makes a lot of sense when you listen to Pigs.

Sci-fi has always been the perfect vehicle for social commentary, because it does not instantly trigger anything inside people. It is an impossible story in an impossible world, so relax. If you want to write something about black and white people, you should write a story about purple and green people instead. That's how X-men escapes all the woke allegations.

All my life I've been interested in dystopias. Firstly post-nuclear annihilation dystopias as I grew up in the 70s and read books far beyond my age group. Then Crichton's "science-gone-wrong" dystopias in book and film form. 2000AD ethnosectarian block-wars and quasi-religious cults. Since the millennium, biohazard/pandemic/pathogenic dystopias. I suppose I've waited all my life for the collapse. Now I think that for the most part T.S.Eliot had it right in The Hollow Men. "Not with a bang but a whimper". I might not have to wait that much longer.

> One particularly brilliant aspect I keep thinking about is how the movie ends. We don’t know what will become of Kee and her baby. [...] We want to think Kee and her baby will change things, but we don’t know for sure because the future is—quite literally, in the final scene—shrouded in fog.

When I first saw this movie, I think the last scene was just her with baby and dead protagonist in a boat, in the fog.

But when I rewatched it more recently, there was also the ship they were trying to reach appearing out of the fog.

Did this movie have two different ending versions? Or did I just misremeber or watched a damaged copy? What ending have you seen?

IMO it would be perfect to turn into a series, they could update it with references to the billionaire class, drones, AI, asymmetric warfare, immigration, pandemics, celebrity and the attention addiction economy!

Apple if you don’t mess up Neuromancer, please make this next!

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