As imagined by British novelist P.D. James in "The Children of Men," the very near future isn't a place you'd ever want to visit.
A worldwide infertility crisis threatens the human race, terrifying gangs prey upon the dwindling populace, and the desperate and elderly queue up for government-sponsored euthanasia. Yet as bleak as James' vision might be, it can't compare to the horrors dreamed up by filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron in adapting her novel for the screen.
Hollywood stands rightly convicted of whitewashing previously published material, but Cuaron and his "Children of Men" creative team are not ones to follow show business precedent. The director didn't just want to make "Children of Men" more visceral, he also tried to make it additionally prophetic. And that's when Cuaron and his collaborators found that the more suffering they invented, the more credible they believed their movie became.
"We didn't want to do a science fiction movie," says Cuaron, the director of "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." "We wanted to do a movie about the state of things."
The state of things, as the movie has it, is one narrow step shy of the apocalypse. Almost all of the cataclysms imagined by James remain, but in the film they're juiced on steroids: Infertility shares the stage with an all-out war against immigrants, and the environment is collapsing at an alarming rate. The crumbling social and political infrastructure from the novel has become in Cuaron's movie a chaotic mix of anarchy and totalitarianism.
When it was published in 1992, James' book was set 29 years ahead -- 2021. It took more than a decade to turn "The Children of Men" into a movie, but in the intervening 14 years, the gap between the present and the story's imagined future contracted; the drama now unfolds just 21 years over the horizon.
"It's more relevant than most movies that are set in the present," says Clive Owen, who stars in the film as its reluctant protagonist, Theo. "It's not farfetched. It's a cautionary tale."
Although "Children of Men" tries to end with a hopeful development, it's not the kind of film typically associated with holiday cheer -- the film opens on Christmas Day.
"It's a very expensive movie," Cuaron says of his production's $87-million budget (which will be reduced to about $75 million through British incentives). "And our co-lead is a black girl with an African accent."
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