What if winter is over? Not just because spring came early this year and we didn’t happen to get much snow, but over for good, forever? The snowy, bitingly cold six-month winter seasons of our childhood, a thing of the past?
What would the result be and how would we react?
It’s easy to project that the outcome wouldn’t be good. Global warming would speed up, agriculture would be knocked off its axis, entire countries would be submerged as the rising temperatures melted the polar ice caps and ocean levels began to rise.
It would be a bad scene, and it’s reasonable to imagine that people would become desperate and all hell would break loose, and the world – or at least large portions of it – would descend into chaos.
Those frightening thoughts – too real this winter, with little snow or ice marking the season – were rushing through my head as I left the cinema after watching Children of Men last week.
The film, based on a novel by P.D. James and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (Great Expectations, Y Tu Mama Tambien) is based on a premise that is so easily imagined it’s spooky.
The story is set in 2027, in England, in a world where humans have stopped giving birth, and no new babies have been born in 18 years.
The grim reality of the situation is brought home at the beginning of the film when the news is broadcast that the world’s youngest person – somewhat of a celebrity – has been killed.
Clive Owen’s character, Theodore Faron, greets the news grimly, but callously, and you get the impression – as he pours booze into his coffee – that he’s beyond caring about much.
England has fulfilled many of 1984’s prophecies. Near-constant public service announcements urging citizens to turn in illegal immigrants, constant surveillance, and the public exhibition of caged “fugees” all indicate it’s a grim state of affairs and apathy could get you killed in short order.
Theo gets a full dose of the reality of the situation when he is kidnapped by the Fishes, a rebel group fighting for the liberation of the imprisoned refugees.
His former partner and the mother of his dead child, Julian Taylor, played by Julianne Moore, whom he apparently hasn’t seen in years, is one of the leaders of the group.
Theo gets drawn – unwillingly at first – into the fight, which in some ways becomes his own battle for meaning and substance in a world that doesn’t seem to have much left of either.
Theo’s purpose – his sole goal – becomes protecting and delivering to safety a newborn baby, a “miracle child” -- the one life that can possibly bring hope and restore faith for the human race.
The lawlessness and chaos is portrayed brilliantly in an almost Mad Max style of delivery. And as the people around Theo begin to get killed off one by one, you get the full sense of the fragility of life and the desperation of the people.
But in one compelling scene, especially, you see proof that this world is not yet beyond redemption. A blizzard of fighting is taking place in a refugee camp where immigrants have been sequestered – with the military bringing in heavy artillery and waging war, seemingly indiscriminately on the largely innocent population.
As Theo and the child’s mother Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) attempt to escape a building surrounded by tanks and soldiers, the baby’s cries suddenly pierce the chaos, and the stunned soldiers and fugees stop fighting and stand in awe – almost worship – as the child is carried through their midst.
It becomes clear that this life, which Owen is risking his own to protect, has the ability to restore peace to a hopeless world, in Christ-like fashion.
My only real criticism of the film is the incredible abruptness of the ending. I wanted more. But perhaps it’s fitting. And it is definitely refreshing not to have all the ends tied up neatly, and as a result I’ve spent the last few days constructing what may have happened next – which I take is a good sign.
There are moments when the film is hard to watch – but it’s always in context and fits with the extreme sense of urgency as the characters race to accomplish their goal surrounded by madness.
But the few gruesome scenes weren’t as disturbing, to me, as the sheer plausibility of the story. The realistic portrayal of exactly how our world could be in just 20 years if we don’t stop screwing with it, and start fixing it.
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