Children of Men (2006) Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Written by Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James. Starring Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine.
I’m going to start with a pair of definitive statements that I know are annoying but very much believe to be true: All science fiction is political, and all stories about the future are actually about the present.
Science fiction, in its broadest definition, is about imagining and extrapolating stories from significant changes to ourselves, our societies, and our worlds. Sure, there are varying degrees of intentionality, and there are certainly people who genuinely think (erroneously) that they are telling a story unaffected by all the pesky problems and prejudices of the world around them.
At the other extreme we have Children of Men, a film that is crafted to say several pointed and complicated things about the world, and does it so exquisitely it has only grown more important and powerful in the twenty years since it was released.
Children of Men is loosely based on the 1992 novel The Children of Men by British author P.D. James (also known as Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park). The film is more of a creative variation on a theme than a direct adaptation, a fact that Alfonso Cuarón was clear about from the start and James herself was happy with in the end. I did read the book around the time it was released, as I was a young fan of James’ mystery novels, but I was much too young to appreciate its themes and don’t remember what I thought about it.
The Children of Men is about a near future in which humans can no longer produce children, and it explores the resulting social, political, and philosophical tensions in the United Kingdom. The main character is an Oxford historian, the plot moves through both halls of government power and dissident groups, and the story explores tyrants rising to power amidst society’s despair, the exploitation of immigrant populations, and the role of faith and religion in both personal and political lives. Because the book is heady, intellectual, and came out in 1992, there are a lot of example of people insisting it cannot possibly be science fiction, such as this New York Times comparison of book and movie from 2006: “The Children of Men is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction. It is a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment, a 14-year-old work that remains surprisingly pertinent.”
It’s silly to frame “science fiction” and “a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment” as separate categories, but it’s a divide people apply to the movie as well, including the people who actually made the movie. I guess the book can’t be sci fi because it’s too serious about explaining its world, and the movie can’t be sci fi because it doesn’t explain its world, and I already find this “is it sci fi???” line of discussion tedious.
Yes, it is. Let’s move on.
The idea for turning James’ novel into a film came not long after the book was released, but it took several years and several screenwriters to get any traction. Paul Chart wrote the first version, then Mark Fergus and Hawk Otsby rewrote it. From early articles, it looks like their script was a lot closer to the book. Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón read their version of the screenplay but wasn’t much interested in it—at least, not at first. He has said in interviews that he initially dismissed it, but something about the story stuck in his mind. When he and screenwriter Timothy J. Sexton took their own crack at the screenplay, they approached it from a rather unexpected angle. As Cuarón described it, “We said: let’s do something like Y tu mamá también—but in the future.”
He was referring to his breakout film Y tu mamá también (2001), a sexy coming-of-age road movie set during Mexico at the end of the 1990s. It is not, on the surface, a film that bears any resemblance to Children of Men, but I think Cuarón’s reasoning makes sense. He had previously made two Americanized versions of British literary classics, The Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998), and he would spend two years in the UK making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Y tu mamá también looks like the outlier in that filmography, but it’s a film Cuarón made to consciously reject the polished Hollywood style of filmmaking in order to better portray the people and places of his home country.
P.D. James’ The Children of Men is yet another very British book, but the parts of the story that fascinated Cuarón weren’t about the people who rise to power or gather to argue about the world’s problems, or even the details of how the near-future world functions. He was looking at it from post-9/11 perspective on world politics and thinking about how he could employ a more intimate scope to use the movie’s speculative world to illuminate our real one.
To do that, he narrowed the scope of the story compared to what’s in the novel, and shifted the sociopolitical commentary away from exploring how and why authoritarian regimes rise to power, moving instead toward looking at what the societies they build do to the least powerful among them. The speculative element underlying the near-future world is more or less the same: Nearly two decades ago, humanity suffered a mass infertility epidemic that science has not been able to cure, and no children have been born since. Cuarón has said repeatedly (probably because he was asked repeatedly) that he had absolutely no interest in trying to explain the infertility, because as soon as you start explaining it people start nitpicking the explanation. He’s completely right about that. He’s also right that it’s irrelevant.
The film follows Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a man living in London in the futuristic year of 2027. Very little about the world is exposited directly, but we learn enough to know that many terrible things have befallen cities and nations around the world. The United Kingdom has closed its borders to immigration and showers the population with propaganda about how Britain is the last civilized place in the world. Refugees are violently rounded up, locked into cages, and shipped to internment camps.
…I know. This won’t be the last time we all collectively pause to stare dully into the middle distance and think about how this movie came out in 2006 and has only become more resonant over the past twenty years.
Theo is an interesting character for a movie that ends up having quite a lot of action in it. While the film is tightly confined to his perspective, he’s not actually a very active protagonist, at least not at first. He’s deeply depressed but not numb, although it seems like he wishes he could be; the only warmth and connection in his life is the time he spends with his hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine cosplaying as John Lennon). When a group of pro-immigration activists led by Theo’s ex, Julian (Julianne Moore), abduct him and demand that he help them, he at first refuses, then reluctantly agrees to do it for the money, not the ideology. Julian’s group wants papers to help transport an undocumented young woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), safely to some unknown destination.
After Julian is killed in an ambush, Theo learns that Kee is pregnant—the world’s first known pregnancy in eighteen years. Julian had been helping her escape Britain to meet up with a group of people trying to solve humanity’s infertility. But Julian’s successor, Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), wants to use Kee and her child to persuade the British government to change its policies, so Theo, Kee, and another woman, Miriam (Pam Ferris) flee the group to make it to Kee’s rendezvous and get her out of the country.
From the ambush and Julian’s death all the way to the end, Children of Men is a chase movie. It is all about getting from one place to another while evading people who want to stop them. I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s great. 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.
Of course, a chase isn’t engaging if we don’t care about who’s being chased and why, and we won’t care about those things if the concentrated action feels disconnected from larger stakes or consequences. An interesting thing about Children of Men is how the movie manages this by being very careful in what it doesn’t tell us. We know that Kee and her child are important, not just because protecting a mother and newborn is always important, but because the world will change with them in it. But we don’t know how. We don’t know what will become of Kee when she reaches the rendezvous. We can’t know, because Theo and Kee don’t know, and the film never strays from its tight focus on them. We don’t even really know who Kee is going to meet. Just like the characters, we’re asked to trust that she is running in the right direction, and that Theo is doing the right thing by helping her.
Without knowing what the endpoint is going to be, the film has to prove to us that it probably won’t be worse than where the characters start. And that’s not enough. The chase itself also has to be interesting.
It helps that the cast is fantastic—Owen and Ashitey are wonderful as two characters who would otherwise have absolutely no reason to interact—and the danger escalates relentlessly without ever feeling like we’re losing track of what’s going on.
Even beyond that, there are two specific achievements of the production that elevate Children of Men from ‘pretty good dystopian action movie’ to a truly great film. The first is the efficiency of the worldbuilding, and the second is the astonishing craftsmanship that went into the cinematography and visual effects.
In a 2006 article, Cuarón explained how he modeled his approach to Children of Men on the Italian-Algerian war film The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. The Battle of Algiers is a movie about Algerian revolutionaries during the war for independence from France in the ’50s; it’s a fictionalized reconstruction based on the tactics and events of the campaign, but it’s filmed in the style of a newsreel or documentary, with a cast made up of non-professional actors, to mimic the feeling of watching real-world events play out on television news. Cuarón said of the film, “The amazing thing about The Battle of Algiers is the social reconstruction. It’s meticulous, and the sense of reality is so unique.”
The speculative premise behind Children of Men is introduced in the opening scene, where Theo and the world learn about the senseless death of the world’s youngest person. The nature of the world is revealed moments later, when the coffee shop Theo has just exited is destroyed by a bomb—and he still goes to work. When he decides to cut out early, it’s the death of an eighteen-year-old across the world that he uses as an excuse for his boss, not the fact that he was steps away from being blown to pieces in a senseless act of violence. Along the way we see news reports, propaganda, advertisements for gentle suicide drugs, and armed soldiers keeping people in cages at train stations, and it’s all vivid and visceral enough that was we can feel how miserable and unsafe it would be to walk those streets. We understand why Theo is depressed, why Jasper hides in the woods to grow and smoke weed, why the dissidents lash out with so much anger, why strangers weep over the death of a teenager they’ve never met.
The movie was filmed on location in London in 2005, which means they were creating a fake terrorist bombing mere weeks after real terrorist bombings in the city. But London of 2005 didn’t look like the dystopian London of 2027 the film needed, so Cuarón brought on visual effects supervisor Frazer Churchill to transport the extremely familiar sights—Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square, Battersea Power Station—into a grimier, grittier future, one where many people have given up on the hope of things ever getting better. It was an even bigger task to transform the real town of Bexhill-on-Sea into the crumbling, overcrowded refugee internment camp without any of it looking fake or computer-generated.
And amidst all that, there is, of course, a newborn baby, who is an on-set dummy covered by CGI, because a premature VFX newborn preserves our immersion in the story better than a real, clean, chubby baby of the wrong age would. The baby was created by Tim Webber and his team.
One visual model Cuarón had in mind for this violent, run-down vision of Britain’s future was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), but there are also points where he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki specifically use real-world imagery. He gave the art department images from “Sri Lanka, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Somalia, Chernobyl, the Balkans,” and he also pushed the largely English crew to “make it more Mexican.” That is, he wasn’t only relying on what people think a shabby futuristic England might look like, but using the film’s imagery to link a speculative near-future with the very real present.
A film’s story isn’t just told in what is shown on screen, but also in how it’s shown. That brings us to one of the most technically interesting aspects of Children of Men, which is its brilliant cinematography.
One thing worth mentioning is how much of the film uses natural lighting. Cuarón and Lubezki didn’t want the film to look stylized or futuristic; they wanted it to look like a documentary of the here and now. So Lubezki used as little artificial lighting as he could get away with, which meant altering some scenes from night to day to allow more light, or sometimes waiting for the fickle English weather to be more favorable. The film isn’t particularly dark or hard to see, because the lack of light is never used to obscure or muddle what’s on screen. It’s treated as part of the environment, so we see the characters as though they are moving through the world.
This is further emphasized by the film’s paucity of closeups. Most of it is filmed from something of a distance, with handheld cameras giving the sense of news or documentary footage. When there are closeups, it’s often because the characters are very close to each other, such as when five of them are jammed into that tiny Fiat.
And then there are those famously long shots, one of the things Children of Men is best known for.
A lot of people with a lot more patience than me have studied individual shot length in movies throughout history and around the world. There are some interesting broad trends: shots in the silent era were trending quite short (four to six seconds) before sound slowed things down, but in general shots have been getting faster and faster since then. The average length of shots depends very much on which countries you look at; Indian movies are infamously rapid-fire, some with shots every one to two seconds, adding up to thousands of shots. Action movies, no matter where they come from, also tend to have a very large number of very quick changes. We’ve watched some films from the other end of the spectrum; Stanley Kubrick loved to make movies with fewer long shots and it’s obvious in both A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But for the most part, especially in movies made more recently than the ’60s or ’70s, it’s pretty normal for a film to have 1000-2000 shots, with a common length of four to six seconds each.
Children of Men is 109 minutes long and contains just 460 shots. That gives the film an extremely long average shot length, especially for an action film that uses handheld cameras. It’s even more insane when you realize that the longest shots are among the most dynamic in the film, with the most action and violence.
Now, before anybody gets geared up to “well, actually” me, I will clarify that Children of Men has a number of extremely long apparent single shots that are made up of shorter—but still unusually long!—shots composited together using VFX. A relatively simple example of combining shots to create an apparent long shot is the coffee shop explosion at the very beginning of the film. The camera meets Theo as he enters the crowded coffee shop, then follows him out onto the street, then captures the explosion behind him. In reality, that shot was filmed on two separate days, with the explosion on the second day blowing up the same location on the same street, but now (obviously) empty.
That’s pretty straightforward compared to the wildly impressive scene later in which the characters are in a car that’s ambushed on a rural country road. It looks like a single shot. It really does. Go back and watch it. It looks like a single shot, even though we know it would be physically impossible to shoot that in a single take. It features five characters talking over each other in a small car interior, numerous attackers coming at the car from every direction, and camera motions that travel over and around and through the car. And it lasts for over six minutes. It was in fact filmed in six different chunks over the course of a week—including some parts where Cuarón, Lubezki, and a camera operator were actually strapped to a rig on top of the car. All of those pieces had to be matched, adjusted, and connected to achieve the seamless look that ends up on screen.
But the scene I find most incredible is the nine-minute shot near the end of the film, which starts when Theo and Kee are separated by the Fishers in the refugee camp, follows Theo through gunfire and explosions as he goes after Kee, through a crowded building until he finds her, then follows them again as he escorts her out of the building while both soldiers and refugees fall silent with awe at the sight of Kee’s newborn baby.
It’s an astonishing scene. Everything about it is breathtaking. The city is falling into chaos, gunfire and shouting and explosions fill the soundscape, the handheld camera first swings between characters like a witness trying to follow a conversation, then races and ducks and dodges along with Theo as he flinches, crawls, and stumbles his way through the warzone. Absolutely nothing about the scene is scripted or filmed to feel heroic. It’s desperate and terrifying, there are people injured and dying everywhere, and we can barely keep track of where we are. There’s no safety in moving from the open streets into the building, because the building is under attack and people are dying in the hallways. When Kee’s baby begins to cry, a stunned, breathless quiet spreads through the building and through the scene.
But the hushed awe doesn’t last. It’s broken by another explosion, and the fighting starts all over again.
It’s not clear from various sources exactly how much of that scene is a single continuous take, but Cuarón and Owen have both spoken about how it took weeks of preparation to get everything ready, and hours of setup for every time they wanted to record a take. If the camera operator tripped six minutes in, they would start over. The moment where blood splashes on the camera lens was unintentional; Cuarón said he tried to stop the take to start over, but because of the explosions nobody heard him and they kept recording. They left the blood on the lens for some of the final scene, but the take is not actually cut when the blood vanishes; they had a visual effects artist remove the droplets digitally for the second part of the scene.
Cuarón and Lubezki filmed as much of the movie in single takes as they could, and used digital effects to seamlessly combine what they could not, because the goal was never to show off their single-take virtuosity. The goal was something a lot more visceral.
Those long shots are the movie’s way of saying: Don’t look away. There’s so much pain and cruelty and suffering. Don’t look away. The world mourns the senseless death of a teenager while people die in the streets. Don’t look away. The rich surround themselves with treasures while there are people crammed into cages. Don’t look away. The violence might pause for a child but it certainly isn’t going to stop. The men with guns don’t care if you are a citizen with the right papers. This dystopia looks exactly like places you’ve seen on the news. These refugees look just like the ones your own governments treat so badly. Don’t look away.
I love this movie. It’s exquisitely crafted, and it provides a smart, incisive look at the world that manages to be contemporary and timeless, even twenty years later. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way; the movie received near-universal praise upon release and remains beloved. Children of Men is still one of the absolute best sci fi movies of the 21st century.
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 don’t know what will become of the world. We have absolutely no idea what, if anything, will change. Because the movie isn’t about that. Even though the film has the structure of an action film, with a recognizable male star at its center, it is not offering the comforting, simplistic fantasy that a white man’s heroic actions will immediately and noticeably save the world. 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.
Children of Men is instead offering a more fragile, but ultimately more valuable, perspective: There is hope in trying to make the world better, even for one young woman and her child, even in the face of overwhelming obstacles, even if you won’t live to see the outcome.
So what do you think of Children of Men? Great movie, right? It’s such a great movie. Watching it again after some years was such a treat.
A Smorgasbord of Mindfuckery
For November and early December, we’ll be watching a handful of films that don’t fit together but also don’t quite fit anywhere else. What they have in common is that I’ve been shuffling them around my list for ages because I wasn’t sure when to watch them.
November 4 — Cube (1997), directed by Vincenzo Natali
This one was suggested way back when I first started this column and has been on the list ever since, but it turns out “Canadian horror movies about people trapped in giant homicidal mazes” is a rather limited niche.
November 11 — Brazil (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam
This could be a leftover from our October theme of movies about the near future, but it’s also very much its own thing that defies classification.
November 18 — Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991), directed by David Blair
Another one that was suggested very early on. I can barely even figure out what it’s about from descriptions and articles, or even if it’s about anything at all. I’m happy to watch it anyway. It may or may not feature bees. Or television.
December 2 — Memories (1995), directed by Koji Morimoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Tensai Okamura
I don’t really know where to put an animated anthology collection of three short films, so we’ll just go ahead and watch it now.
December 9 — Donnie Darko (2001), directed by Richard Kelly
You know what they say: Nothing in life guaranteed except death and rabbits.
Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for children, teens, and adults, including the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award winner Dead Space. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Reactor, and other speculative fiction magazines. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com.