\nOne tactic of science fiction is to show us our own world in masked fantasy so that in seeing our folly committed outrageously by strangers we might recognize it in ourselves. The future of Children of Men<\/i> is not so distant that we can’t immediately recognize all its elements as part of our current lives. Indeed, if you asked a resident a Baghdad twenty years ago to imagine his city and life in ruins today he might have thought it as improbable as the Alfonso Cuaron’s imagined London of 2027. Children of Men<\/i> remixes current events in a way that brings them home to Western audiences more successfully than the 2-minute nightly news clips do. Anti-immigration hysteria. Terrorist bombings. Conspiracy theorists. National IDs. Constant video surveillance. All of this is part of life in 2007. We hardly notice how we’ve traded liberty for security, as we stop for our morning latte and become engrossed in the latest TV celebrity death.\n<\/p>\n
\nIn 2027, it is not Princess Di but the death of the youngest person on earth who captures the hearts of Theo Faron’s (Clive Owen) countrymen. Human society has devolved because human beings are no longer able to procreate. Without children there is no hope. And without hope we might as all be our worst selves.\n<\/p>\n
\nThis is not a conceit that I buy into, particularly. The majority of my friends, married or not, are childless, and I don’t see them languishing in hopelessness. If the only thing keeping society going is our ability to pass part of ourselves down to future generations, then we are doing a strange job as custodians of our legacy to them. This argument seems to me in the same category of philosophy that posits that the only thing that keeps us civil is the promise, or threat, of an afterlife. I think that if we believed this moment was the only moment we had, we might try harder to make the most of it. However, the conceit does give humanity a chance to be redeemed by a child; Children of Men<\/i> opened on Christmas Day to underscore the obvious.\n<\/p>\n
\nCuaron, thankfully, does not spend a lot of time on backstory. He simply explores the world as a given and shows us a world, that for many people in 2007 is the given. The movie’s reluctant hero, Theo, is dragged (literally) into a plot to help a resistance\/terrorist group get a young refugee to safety.\n<\/p>\n
\nVisually the movie is very interesting with layers and layers of images mirroring contemporary culture. As an antidote to the quick-cut chase movies, Cuaron includes some extremely long takes. (One 9-minute shot, it’s rumored, was actually stitched seamlessly together from several shorter takes–Cuaron explains it wasn’t<\/a>. CGI was used but only to remove the blood from the camera lens.) Another chase sequence gets off to a very slow start and is at the same time tense and ludicrous. You want to laugh but you’re too involved in the moment and the danger to laugh. Cuaron shows us that everything we’ve learned about action thrillers in the 1990s is old and tired.\n<\/p>\n \nIn a scene early in Children of Men<\/i>, Theo visits his well-connected cousin to try to get safe passage to the coast. As he is driven into the imposing Battersea Power Station the strains of King Crimson’s “The Court of the Crimson King<\/a>” swell and I’m floored. I’m so distracted by this music that the movie takes on a surrealistic air; I can’t tell where Cuaron’s visions end and my begin. And the song goes on and on. I try to get AJM’s attention but I don’t think he knows the song. That song. I built worlds around it, too. What it reminds me of more than anything is a drive in 1973 away from Las Vegas, through the mountains near St. George, Utah and on to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. The next time I made that drive, the song replayed in my head with its attendant memories.\n<\/p>\n \nHow could I not like a movie when the director has such agreeable taste in music? Pink Floyd fans might be equally thrilled to see a visual homage to Pink Floyd’s “Animals<\/a>” album cover a few moments later.\n<\/p>\n Children of Men Trailer<\/a><\/p>\n \niTunes doesn’t have any other King Crimson but does carry the soundtrack album for “Children of Men”, including “In the Court of the Crimson King”. You have to buy the whole album. It is a great soundtrack but I’d prefer the choice. Oddly, it’s labelled “Explicit”–all the songs in the soundtrack are, I guess because one of them is and you can’t buy them separately. I don’t remember anything explicit about it and, my poor parents (who listened to it a zillion times on the car ride from Nevada to Florida and back to Texas) didn’t seem to notice it either.\n<\/p>\n \nI wonder why Cuaron chose this track from “In the Court of the Crimson King”. On the surface, “21st Century Schizoid Man” seems more appropriate. And thematically, the lyrics to “Epitaph” fit better.\n<\/p>\n \nWhat cheery jingles I listened to in my youth!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “It’s not about imagining and being creative, it is about referencing reality. So — the cinematographer, he said that not a single frame of this film can go by making a comment about the state of things. So everything became about reference — and not reference about what is around, like, oh, I’m walking around, and this is what I saw on the street, but about how this has relevance in the context of the state of things, of the reality that we are living today.” — Alfonso Cuaron Interview with Kim Voynar in Cinematical<\/a><\/p>\nPostscript<\/h3>\n
\n
\nThe wall on which the prophets wrote\nIs cracking at the seams.\nUpon the instruments of death\nThe sunlight brightly gleams.\nWhen every man is torn apart\nWith nightmares and with dreams,\nWill no one lay the laurel wreath\nAs silence drowns the screams.\n<\/pre>\n
\nConfusion will be my epitaph.\nAs I crawl a cracked and broken path\nIf we make it we can all sit back\nAnd laugh.\nBut I fear tomorrow Ill be crying,\nYes I fear tomorrow Ill be crying.\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n