“Children of Men” Save the World

The premise of “Children of Men” is pretty ingenious. In an apocalyptic future in which no woman can get pregnant, the world is in chaos. The youngest person alive is a celebrity. No cause is found for this bizarre phenomenon. The end draws near. Suddenly, a young woman is found to be pregnant. If people knew about this, there would be riots. So, in secrecy, she is shuttled off to a mysterious island so that scientists can find out why she's pregnant. The movie spans this transport of the pregnant woman to a place of safety. There is a major biblical parallel; a helpless baby born in a dark world and the sacrifice it took to ensure the safety of mother and child by the protagonist. The movie really played up the idea that the birth of a baby was a scientific impossibility.

What the premise says about our world is up for debate. I had a conversation with a man on a train one time about M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening," a movie we both disliked. However, I was given a new perspective on the movie that may translate to "Children of Men," I suppose. In Night's movie, plants start releasing a neurotoxin that causes people to dramatically commit suicide. The "point" of this is that we are killing ourselves by killing the planet, kind of like global warming but on a much more personal and dramatic level. Is the point of "Children of Men" that we as a human race are so antagonistic to each other that we are rendering the race sterile? Are we killing ourselves out of existence? Genocide, civil war, fighting over resources, religious fanaticism- are all these the possible cause of human extinction?

It’s an interesting allegory used at times in films for such purposes. If death is what we do, than death is what we’ll get. It’s sort of the reversal of Chaos Theory as explained in Jurassic Park. Instead of “life finding a way,” we find that “death finds a way.” We’ve been entrusted to take care of an earth. We have a moral responsibility to treat life as sacred. How are we doing on those fronts? The writer of “Children of Men” may have something quite provocative to say about that.