Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Children of Men envisages a world one generation from now that has fallen into anarchy on the heels of an infertility defect in the population. The world's youngest citizen has just died at 18 and humankind is facing the likelihood of its own extinction.Runtime: 109 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS Rating: R UPC: 025193251329 Manufacturer No: 61032513

Amazon.com:
Presenting a bleak, harrowing, and yet ultimately hopeful vision of humankind's not-too-distant future, Children of Men is a riveting cautionary tale of potential things to come. Set in the crisis-ravaged future of 2027, and based on the atypical 1993 novel by British mystery writer P.D. James, the anxiety-inducing, action-packed story is set in a dystopian England where humanity has become infertile (the last baby was born in 2009), immigration is a crime, refugees (or "fugees") are caged like animals, and the world has been torn apart by nuclear fallout, rampant terrorism, and political rebellion. In this seemingly hopeless landscape of hardscrabble survival, a jaded bureaucrat named Theo (Clive Owen) is drawn into a desperate struggle to deliver Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the world's only pregnant woman, to a secret group called the Human Project that hopes to discover a cure for global infertility. As they carefully navigate between the battling forces of military police and a pro-immigration insurgency, Theo, Kee, and their secretive allies endure a death-defying ordeal of urban warfare, and director Alfonso Cuaron (with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) capture the action with you-are-there intensity. There's just enough humor to balance the film's darker content (much of it coming from Michael Caine, as Theo's aging hippie cohort), and although Children of Men glosses over many of the specifics about its sociopolitical worst-case scenario (which includes Julianne Moore in a brief but pivotal role), it's still an immensely satisfying, pulse-pounding vision of a future that represents a frightening extrapolation of early 21st-century history. --Jeff Shannon

Rating : - Dystopian Dysfunction
Oddly, I must be one of the few folks to have seen "Children of Men" and did not form an opinion as to it being a rancid pile of rotting mule skin or the greatest movie since Silent Running. I found the basic premise to be fascinating: How would the world react twenty years into an epidemic of childlessness? Which some of the reviewers here seem to miss...this is not just how the world reacts to the onset of infertility, but almost two decades since the last baby was born. So many industries would fall into slow collapse; education, garments, much of the medical industry, etc...as the population ages past the point where new folks would replenish both consumer and professional.

Clive Owen starts off the movie in a coffee shop as the world learns of the death of its youngest citizen. He walks into a city full of violent rebellion and to where Britain is the last nation that hasn't fallen into anarchy. The government has slipped into a fascist state in order to keep from being overrun by refugees, yet Owen's ex-wife (Julianne Moore, great in a brief role) kidnaps him to set a plot into motion. They have discovered the last pregnant woman on Earth, an African named Kee. They need to smuggle her out of England to a mysterious "Human Project" group.

This is where the chaos really begins and the allegories become oppressive. Kee's baby has no discernable father (and a miracle birth is even joked about). The miracle baby has factions splitting off of factions before the little savior is even born. Oh yes, the African mother; how very Cradle of Civilization! Plus one reclusive ex-hippie idealist (Michael Caine, all crazy hair, John Lennon and homegrown weed) to emphasize just how badly the sixties failed when they were all so much better then than these fascists now.

The heavy handedness of the message is carried by some incredible cinematography, like the near ten minute single-camera shot of Owen racing through the prison camp uprising while under fire. London in decay is depressingly gritty as is the Fugee concentration camp (with shades of Abu Gharib). The sense of dread curdles under each character (like Owen's visit to his brother, the art curator), yet the tiny light of hope of the new baby still stops a war in its tracks, however briefly.

It is that final sense of redemption - the "maybe we might get our miserable species out of this mess anyway" message - that keeps the relentlessly bleak view of "Children of Men" from completely tanking. But it's the ham-fisted proletyzing that also stops it from arcing beyond its science-fiction art-house roots.