I had the absolute pleasure of being able to see Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 modern masterpiece Children of Men on the big screen, thanks to the Sydney Opera House and Alexei Toliopoulos’ new Saturday Film Club. Being way too young to have been able to see it on its original theatrical run, it was an unmissable opportunity to see it projected with a large audience.
Often science fiction films are examined as a tool for imagining our future, for visualising a future that could either be utopic or dystopic in nature, and for commenting on the choices we can then make as a culture. However Children of Men is a rare and cherished case in which its science fiction aspirations are more interested in drawing a line through history to better understand our present. While at the time of its initial release it may have indeed been a piece of speculative fiction, almost twenty years later its “futuristic” setting of 2027 is upsettingly near. It’s one of those science fiction films that take place “two weeks from now,” but when you see this film today it seems to be almost entirely composed of images and iconography from yesterday’s news.
Tell me if any of this sounds familiar. Immigrants being ripped off the streets and from their homes. Horrendous conditions in refugee camps that evoke images from WWII concentration camps. An authoritarian police state ruling with an iron fist. Rampant Islamophobia and cultural intolerance. Isolationist foreign policy. Terrorist attacks.
Oppressive military presence in already infrastructurally crippled civilian areas. A general pervasive feeling that society is going nowhere good fast.
All of these things were obviously present in the mid-2000s when Children of Men was produced and released. One clear parallel that would have definitely resonated at the time is the visual allusions to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. Protagonist Theo (Clive Owen) is so desensitised to the sight of refugees being held in cages that he seems to either not notice or ignore them. Cuaron’s curious camera doesn’t let us off the hook,
however, constantly getting distracted by the images in the background and placing them firmly in the foreground.
And yet here we are in the second half of 2025. The war in Ukraine continues on. The Palestinian genocide continues. We watch as major democratic countries become more and more isolationist. And as more and more immigrants are displaced by conflict or fear, they are greeted by increasingly hostile immigration policies.
Despite all of this, there is hope. In Children of Men the catalyst for a lot of this is the 18 years of infertility humanity has endured. 18 years with no new children born, 18 years of humanity slowly drifting into the abyss. The hope arrives in the form of Kee, a young immigrant woman who is miraculously pregnant.
You don’t have to have a doctorate in theology to be able to see the religious allegory
Children of Men is running with.
And yet there is still work to be done. The miracle has arrived – Kee is carrying the first newborn child in 18 years – but there is still work to be done. Kee must be transported to the Human Project (who may or may not even exist) at all costs, which requires travelling across a treacherous country and through a horrendous refugee camp to get into a boat and hopefully get picked up. Theo is tasked with escorting Kee and the child, and it of course proves to be no simple task. In fact, the task ends up costing his life.
And yet that is the view of hope that is presented by Children of Men – one that requires action. It is a call to active faith, and a call to active hope. If it wasn’t enough to simply sit around and wait for somebody or something to come and “save us” in 2006, it seems laughable today.
The film doesn’t expect Theo (or us) to be unrealistic in our ambitions, though. Initially Theo is reluctant to engage with the Fishes when he is approached by the movement’s now leader and his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore). When the background he has tried
so hard to ignore through drinking himself into an early grave is presented to him, it is too much. What could I possibly do to change the tides that are threatening to drown the entire world? That all changes when he is confronted with the reality that Kee is pregnant. At this point I don’t think Theo cares whether or not this miracle child will prove to be the thing that could pull humanity out of the jaws of extinction. I think he simply wants to make sure that she can safely give birth, and then leave the violence and insanity that the UK has descended into.
When confronted with the task of saving the world, it is impossible. But when asked to look after one person – one vulnerable young mother who is completely ill-equipped to bring her child into a cruel and uncaring world – Theo is activated. Theo finds meaning and value in his life, where up until that point he had lost everything.
This is the type of hope that Children of Men offers us, and it is remarkably more relevant today than it ever could have been in 2006. It is a hope that asks us to travel with it – to take it and enact that hope ourselves. A hope that can only truly exist if it is taken down from the protected pedestal and into the filth, violence and grief of real life. Until it is given the opportunity to speak truth, love and grace into our dying and broken world, it is nothing more than a nice platitude someone might engrave on our tombstone one day.
Children of Men is now streaming on Binge
Jonty Cornford writes about film and narrative on his Substack, Postcards from the Abyss.
