Children of Men
Children of Men is a tough film to classify. It takes place in the future, so it must be science-fiction, right? Except the future in this film isn't very technologically advanced, and the moral dilemma faced by the characters and humanity wasn't directly caused by or facilitated by technology. So does it still qualify?
Unless you're desperate for flying cars, lasers and robots, it doesn't matter. What matters is that
Children of Men is perhaps the most realistically frightening vision of a dystopian future ever put on film. If only the script had been on par with Alfonso Cuarón's direction, it could have been one of the all-time greats.
Cuarón, who directed the superb Y tu mamá también (and was clearly better than the dull material presented to him by
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is also one of Children of Men's five screenwriters. That many scribes is almost never a good sign, and the end result here is definitely shoddy.
The script is wholly unremarkable in almost every way but the plot (which comes from P.D. James' novel), and Cuarón seems to have kept the one or two well-written scenes and thrown the rest out the window in favor of an intensely visual film full of stunning long takes, bleak imagery and pathos, all somehow cloaked in a shroud of hope.
The script never explains why the world's women have become infertile. It doesn't describe what course of events sparked terror on an unimaginable global scale and produced a fascist government that's rounding up and kicking every single immigrant off the Isle of Britain. And it doesn't have to because Cuarón scares the hell out of you with a stark, credible prophecy of a future that very well could come to pass.
If only his and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's marvelous brushstrokes weren't needed to paint over an unacceptably lifeless screenplay, we might be talking about a great film, instead of just a very good one.