Essentially a protracted chase movie with several psychically draining set pieces, Children of Men has a plot stripped down to the point of being elemental (rather amazing given its five credited screenwriters). Its premise, however, is uniquely unsettling: Set in 2027, the movie portrays a world in which the human race has mysteriously lost the ability to procreate and, rather than going out gracefully, has descended into wholesale brutality.
The movie follows Theo (Owen), a disillusioned but well-connected London bureaucrat who, on the day of the murder of the planet's youngest citizen, endures a coffeehouse bombing and being kidnapped at gunpoint. The perpetrator of the second (and possibly first) event is his ex-wife (Moore), the leader of a sect of revolutionaries opposed to the government's imprisonment of immigrants seeking refuge in the relative security of England. The group drafts him to help ferry a young 'fugee, Kee (Ashitey), to a remote scientific sanctuary known as the Human Project, which may or may not exist. Little is as it seems, though, and things go from bad to worse as Theo experiences a pair of tragic losses and is forced to go on the run with Kee, who harbors a whopping secret.
As with Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien, the genius of Children of Men is in the virtuosity of its scope and the subtlety of its details. Its stark mise en scene, rife with Holocaust and Guantanamo imagery, recalls everything from Elem Klimov's equally grueling Come and See to 28 Days Later (for which cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland deserve credit), while its storyline pivots on a radical application of Judeo-Christianity's most treasured myth. Yet the film never misplaces the personal sense of loss inspired by its miserable scenario, nor does it ignore the warmth and even humor of its characters' various adaptations to the same (dogs, always suitable child surrogates, figure prominently but unobtrusively throughout).
The cast nails this duality cold, particularly Owen as a benignly charming man of inaction (Theo never touches a gun and even manages to lose his shoes halfway through the movie), Caine as his pot-growing, fart-joking friend and mentor and Peter Mullan as a terrifying neo-centurion. What ultimately makes Children of Men so piercing, however, is its suggestion—which ought to be intuitive, yet somehow escapes our grasp with depressing ease—that the human impulse toward self-destruction (and possibly our fascination with its cinematic and literary depiction) will inevitably bear fruit. For all that, the film is itself a kind of Human Project, and its clear-eyed compassion gives bracing credence to its argument that every death is also a birth.