Children of Men (2006): Cuarón's Nightmare of 2027 Arrives Next Year, and It Still Hits Like a Bullet

Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is set in 2027. That's next year. When it came out in 2006, it played like a grim what-if. Watching it in its 20th-anniversary year is more unsettling, because the calendar has nearly caught up with the movie and a lot of what it imagined no longer looks imaginary.

Nobody on Earth has given birth in 18 years. Britain holds itself together as a police state that keeps refugees in cages. Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is a former activist turned burned-out civil servant. Then his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) has him kidnapped and asks him to get a young refugee named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) out of the country. Kee is carrying the one thing the world has stopped believing in.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Watch the first two minutes. In a London café, a crowd stares at a TV report: the youngest person in the world has been killed. Theo walks out with his paper cup, and a few seconds later the café explodes behind him. The camera doesn't cut away, and Theo doesn't do an action-hero shrug. In his review, Roger Ebert pointed out that he crouches and his face freezes in fear. This is not a movie where heroes are unafraid of dying.

That sets the terms for everything after. Most dystopias show off their production design. This one buries it in the background: cars that are almost ours, billboards that are a little off. Cuarón told his art department the film was the "anti-Blade Runner" and turned down the high-tech ideas they pitched. Ebert said that partway through, he started treating this London as a real place.

What's left is a chase movie with a pulse and a lot of grief in it. Owen gives one of the great tired performances, a man whose only armor is a dry joke. Michael Caine, as his old hippie friend Jasper, supplies the warmth. And the ending won't promise you everything will be fine. It just shows you one small reason it might be.

Behind the Scenes

Spoiler warning: The sections below discuss major plot turns, including a key character's death and the final act.

Cuarón chose not to read P.D. James's 1992 novel because he was afraid he'd start second-guessing himself. Co-writer Timothy J. Sexton read the book, and Cuarón read a shortened version. He showed Owen The Battle of Algiers as a model for what he wanted. In a 2016 Vulture interview quoted by the BFI, he called the film "an essay, a diagnosis of the state of things at the time."

The look came out of an argument. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki told American Cinematographer that he pictured the film as about 60 percent Steadicam. On the first day, after five Steadicam takes, Cuarón told him to go handheld instead, and the Steadicam mostly stayed in the truck after that. Lubezki later admitted Cuarón "proved me wrong." They shot mostly on an 18mm lens, kept their distance from the actors and used almost no close-ups. Lubezki said violence tends to look beautiful on film, and he didn't want this movie to "beautify or glorify it." They also used very little lighting. The birth scene was lit by a single bulb standing in for a gas lantern.

The 7/7 bombings hit London while Cuarón was preparing the shoot, and the Fleet Street café explosion was filmed about six weeks later. For the run-down neighborhoods, his note to the crew was "make it more Mexican." It was, he explained, about poverty.

The production's most famous accident came during the battle at the Bexhill refugee camp, a roughly six-minute shot. Preparing it took 14 days, and every reset of the explosions and extras took about five hours. With the location running out, the camera operator fell during one take. On the final attempt, a refugee is shot as Theo moves through a wrecked bus, and fake blood spattered the lens. Cuarón said he yelled "Cut!" but an explosion drowned him out, so he decided to keep rolling. He thought the shot was ruined. Lubezki called it a miracle. The drops stay on the lens as Theo steps into the gray daylight, and suddenly you aren't watching from a safe seat anymore.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• A Pink Floyd pig. Theo's cousin keeps "rescued" art inside Battersea Power Station. An inflatable pig hovers outside the windows, Cuarón's nod to the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals. Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica and Banksy's kissing policemen are in the same scene. The BFI reports that Cuarón met with Banksy's manager and only afterward suspected that the man at the next table was probably Banksy himself.

• A tower that didn't exist yet. The Shard was added to the skyline digitally, based on early architectural drawings. It would be built by 2027.
• Jasper is part John Lennon. Caine suggested modeling the character on Lennon. The cartoons on Jasper's walls are by Steve Bell.
• A lullaby with no babies. Deep Purple's "Hush" plays on Jasper's car radio. The Los Angeles Times called it a "sly lullaby for a world without babies."
• Music for the camp. John Tavener's Fragments of a Prayer runs through the film like a hymn. At Bexhill, Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima takes over.
• A Pietà. A woman wails over her dead son outside the Russian couple's apartment. Cuarón has said the image is based on a news photograph from the Balkans that itself echoes Michelangelo's Pietà.
• The last word. The end titles read "Shantih Shantih Shantih," the Sanskrit word for peace that closes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem about a world that has lost its fertility. Jasper says the same words earlier.

The Director's Genius Moment

The ambush on the country road: about four minutes staged as one unbroken shot.

It starts as the gentlest scene in the movie. Theo and Julian, who split up after their son died, are crammed in a little car with Kee, the midwife Miriam and the activist Luke. To entertain the others, they do a silly ping-pong-ball trick, and for a moment Owen and Moore are flirting again. Then a burning car rolls down the hill, a mob rushes out of the trees, and Julian is shot in the throat. The car reverses at full speed with the attackers closing in, and the camera never gives you a cut to catch your breath.

Pulling it off took real engineering. American Cinematographer describes a roofless car with an H-shaped track hung above it. The "Two-Axis Dolly" rig, built by Gary Thieltges of Doggicam Systems, let the camera slide front to back and side to side between the actors. An operator ran it from a pod on top, and Lubezki rode along. Cuarón first wanted to fake the shot with CGI. Lubezki talked him out of it, reminding him they were trying to make something like a raw documentary.

The "one take" is partly an illusion. According to the effects team at Double Negative, the ambush was shot in six sections at four locations over a week and stitched together digitally. Lubezki has pointed to hidden cuts at a bullet impact and where the camera leaves the car. Because the joins don't show, you never get the relief of a cut. You're trapped in that car with Theo the whole way.

Another Way to See It

P.D. James was a devout Anglican, and the BFI notes how hard the Christian imagery is to miss: the pregnancy is revealed in a barn among cattle, and Theo's reaction is a stunned "Jesus Christ." The critic Mark Fisher opened his 2009 book Capitalist Realism with the film. Slavoj Žižek, who appears in the DVD extras, argued that the real infertility in the film is the lack of "meaningful historical experience."

There's a less academic way in. Ebert noticed that dogs are everywhere, even in the middle of a firefight, and that Theo reaches out to touch one. The politics aren't simple, either. The Fishes, the radicals fighting for refugees, betray Theo and try to use Kee's baby as a weapon. Watch the Bexhill battle when Theo leads Kee and her newborn daughter out of the building. Soldiers and rebels see the baby, and the shooting stops. For a few moments everyone remembers what the fighting was supposed to protect. Then the firing starts again. Hope is real in this movie, and it lasts about as long as a crying baby can hold a room.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, and especially now. Children of Men premiered in Venice in September 2006, and Universal opened it in U.S. theaters at Christmas. It made about $70 million on a $76 million budget and was filed away as a respected flop. It got three Oscar nominations, for adapted screenplay, cinematography and editing, and won BAFTAs for cinematography and production design. In the BBC's 2016 critics' poll of the best films of the 21st century, it came in 13th.

It's harrowing, a major character dies early and suddenly, and the violence is shown plainly. It's also under two hours, moves like a thriller and ends on one of the decade's most quietly hopeful images. Watch it on the biggest screen you have with the sound up, and don't look away during the long takes. Cuarón went to a lot of trouble to make sure you can't.