While departing from the majority of contemporary action movies in its unique style and blatant political leanings, Children of Men might be the exemplary post-9/11 film for its genre. For here is a veritable piece of mass entertainment, one providing the vicarious rush of action, adventure, and heroism essential for drawing the large audience it and an extremely nervous Universal Pictures (which, according to rumors, dumped what they assumed to be an uncommercial film during the annual December/January fire sale) obviously covet; and yet here is also a film throwing the concept of the vicarious rush into doubt to such an extent that it shifts the very boundaries which once more clearly demarked the separation of realism and heroism, political iconography and fantastical mythology. These tensions at the center of Children of Men, directed by Y Tu Mamá También and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban's Alfonso Cuarón, are directly related to its very different representation of violent spectacle. Venturing beyond conventional entertainment and into the realm of simulated reportage, Children of Men employs stunning verisimilitude within its mise-en-scène, raising the stakes of intense action and at the same time, intentionally or not, questioning exactly what it is audiences seek in these displays. It's a profound, unsettling amalgam expressing the crisis of and for relevant entertainment a little more than five years after the events of September 11 have altered American viewers' relationship to on-screen catastrophe.

Children of Men's opening scene functions as exposition and statement of intent: in a London café, in the year 2027, a group of dazed viewers glance up at a television monitor broadcasting breaking news of the death of the world's youngest person, "Baby Diego," eighteen years old. Theo (Clive Owens) moves through the crowd, orders a coffee, and, after a cut back from the TV screen, walks outside in an unbroken shot. A few yards down the street he adjusts the lid of his paper cup, and without warning a bomb destroys the café he had just exited; a survivor stumbles out of the wreckage screaming and missing a limb. In this moment Cuarón establishes the cause (albeit, largely unelaborated) of his fictional world's chaotic state and of the worldwide infertility threatening imminent extinction of the human race, while reflecting back to the audience its own gaze and initiating the film's prime aesthetic strategy, the long take. Even when not using shots of noticeably lengthy duration, Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (renowned for his work on Terrence Malick's The New World) display in long shots a detailed mise-en-scène to rival the vivid, lived-in quality of Blade Runnerbleak ruin and urban chaos, the streets plagued by terrorism, protesters, and religious fanatics, and patrolled by police throwing into detainment camps all illegal immigrants who've escaped destroyed countries to seek refuge ("Only Britain Soldiers On" blares a public service announcement warning citizens against harboring refugees).

Theo's brush with death barely changes his outlook. As a disillusioned former activist and present government bureaucrat he has, like the world around him, given up hope in the future. He looks forward only to his sojourns to the rustic, hidden neohippie compound of best friend and political cartoonist Jasper (Michael Caine)together they alleviate their troubles by smoking pot and making dark jokes about the hellish reality (government-approved suicide kits, for one) in which they live. Things change for Theo, however, when he gets abducted by a group called the Fishes, quasipeaceful underground rebels (most bombings, we learn, are actually perpetrated by the government and blamed on this faction to foster fear and reinforce support for the authoritiesa direct allusion to paranoia concerning the causes of 9/11) that demand full rights for immigrants. The Fishes are led by Theo's ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), who asksor, rather, bribesthe divorced husband she hasn't seen for twenty years to obtain transit papers for a young black refugee, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey). Self-interested Theo does so (his and Julian's attraction to each other hasn't dissipated, even after the loss of their child and the breakup of their marriage), joining Julian, rebel Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Kee, and Kee's caretaker, Miriam (Pam Ferris), along for a car ride to the coast where Kee will be dropped off. But along the wayand in the film's first major set piece, the one that makes it clear Children of Men is something out of the ordinarythe crew gets ambushed by multitudinous terrorist-looters who push a burning vehicle in the car's path and set upon it with rocks, Molotov cocktails, motorcycles, and guns. The sequence is shot in one continuous take that flawlessly navigates within the confines of the car (and, toward the shot's conclusion, outside it) to capture chaos at just the right moments, a panoptical survey with action occurring on multiple planes and often disappearing beyond the scope of the lens.

Theo narrowly escapes a terrorist attack

During this staging of the most intricate cinematic choreography, Julian is shot and killed, a dramatic blow to Theo. The survivors escape the police and find safe haven at a Fish member's farm. There Kee reveals to Theo the reason for her illegal transportationshe's pregnant. The Fishes want to get her to the Human Project, a rumored organization of the world's best scientists dedicated to understanding and remedying the world's greatest mystery. But the Fishes also have designs to use her impending baby as a 'flag' to rally the dispossessed around their cause, an opportunistic move Theo finds suspicious. Later that evening Theo overhears a conversation between new Fish leader Luke and Patric (Charlie Hunnam)—the ambush was a set-up and coup, meant to move Luke into power and allow them to use Kee and her child. Knowing their livelihoods are in danger, Theo, to whom Kee has placed her unconditional trust, leads the pregnant girl and Miriam out of the farm in a thrilling scene not as pronounced as the preceding set piece but nonetheless intensely suspenseful.

The remainder of the film plays out as a race against time to meet the brazenly named Tomorrow ship that will bring Kee and her baby, born in transit, to the Human Project. Cuarón's reliance on the integrity of the shot rather than the impact of the cut, however, applies a different look and feel to standard action-movie fare, and his allusions to the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp, Middle East riots, and Third World conditions complicate the notion of the film as easily digestible product. The film's climax and pièce de résistance takes place in a walled city for detained refugees that Theo and Kee have clandestinely entered in order to rendezvous with the ship. Fascistic police practices, ghetto chaos, and burnt bodies greet their arrival. As in the opening's logistical attention to the decline of civilization, the closing chapter unflinchingly portrays the horror and squalor of institutional oppression, from bombed out tenements to dog-eat-dog survival tactics. When Theo and Kee escape the city during the throes of an all-out war agitated by 'liberating' Fishes, Cuarón and Lubezki once again display their commitment to sequential long takes that maintain Theo and Kee as the main points of interest but often refuse to privilege them over the anarchy unfolding around them. Central characters die like extras, with the entire sceneand, most unforgettably, the slaughter of refugeespointing to the existence of such atrocities beyond the space of the movie theater.

In her classic essay "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag characterized the contemporaneous (Fifties and Sixties) science-fiction film as dealing in "the aesthetics of destruction" by which "one can participate in the fantasy of living through one's own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself." She wrote that "science fiction films are one of the purest forms of spectacle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone's feelings Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violencea technological view." What would Sontag make of Children of Men, a twenty-first-century sci-fi extravaganza in the dystopic vein? Cuarón's long shots and long takes engage in a clearly sought estheticism, rendering disaster exciting to the eye (and manna to cinephiles). But because destruction and violence in Children of Men are not only perpetrated by citizens on one anotherinstead of some stand-by Other in the form of a machine, monster, or alienbut also because the cinematic representation of destruction and violence echoes widely circulated images of real-life cruelty and war, the technological view is mitigated and the human view amplified. If, according to Sontag, "the lure of generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations," then Children of Men fails to entirely transport the spectator in an escapist mannerone gasps at the film's creative and technical achievements, but there's little unthinking, amoral pleasure taken from viewing horrendous urban conditions and the assault on the refugee city, or the acts of brother killing brother fostered by political extremism and raw survival. In this sense, Children of Men tethers its esthetic designs to an eschatological realism rarely seen before from films of its box-office clout. As with Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds—which, while not explicitly political, alluded to the September 11 attacks in its harrowing scenes of massacre—its entertainment is haunted by the specter of large-scale catastrophe resolutely seen and experienced from a human perspective.

But in another sense, Cuarón recuperates the missing dimension of epic fantasy by infusing Children of Men with unmistakable mythological overtones. How else to explain the film's nearly embarrassing messianism, in the form of nothing less than a fatherless pregnancy and the birth of mankind's savior (significantly, as the L Magazine's Mark Asch has pointed out, in a refugee camp)? Nearly embarrassing because this somehow works for the film, which refuses to entirely drop its realistic integrity for false idealism: when Theo, Kee, and her child exit the bombed-out building from where he rescues her, they leave in their wake stunned and reverent onlookersfreedom fighters, refugees, and soldiers alikewho stop skirmishing to marvel at the miracle before them, only to return to mayhem moments later, any unification sadly temporary.

Michael Caine as Jasper

Nonetheless, Children of Men again follows War of the Worlds by offering—not as a last resort as in Spielberg's film but, rather, put in place from the beginning—humble individual heroism amidst ubiquitous despair. Even if its formulaic narrative (including the redemptive theme of 'faith vs. chance' applied to Theo's redeemed white male hero) is an accessible gateway to the film's subversive surprises, it sheds light on the mixed motivations behind New Disaster Films like itself and War of the Worlds. Those who've criticized Children of Men for failing, unlike the P.D. James novel on which it is based, to sufficiently examine the more probable ramifications of its apocalyptic premise miss the point: Cuarón uses a hypothetical scenario not to engage philosophical and ethical debate, but to reflect back to viewers the political language of their own time while offering a humanistic message of hope ostensibly meant to transcend the complications of actual politics. An art-house entry like Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf, which employed an even thinner catastrophic pretext, can intimately explore patterns of chaos and the behavior of its fallible characters due to its deemphasis on special effects and production design; but Children of Men must accede to the demands of its mass audience for recognizable structures and character arcsby stripping substantive issues of all but their iconography, the film's spectacles function as politics, its politics as spectacles.

When one acknowledges the context in which Children of Men exists as entertainment, the question then becomes whether Cuarón strategically works subversive elements into a blockbuster or else renews the sci-fi/action hybrid by means of topical material. Even more than War of the Worlds, Children of Men will most likely split its audience into those who see it as a cynical exploitation of the present complex geopolitical situation for purposes of cinematic showmanship and those who see it as a genuinely provocative warning about our potential future. Such divisiveness proves the New Disaster Film's relatively more 'responsible' confrontations with death and destruction play out, purposely or innately, as radical esthetics, as rousing spectacles expounding on the very nature of spectacle.

And yet these films never fully relinquish the servitude to universal catharsis their stature in the marketplace demandstheir exorcism of public trauma is rooted partly in conscious reassessment and partly in reassuring familiarities. How filmmakers continue to portray large-scale devastation and the iconography of 9/11, and how audiences react to their offerings, will be informed by these initial, ambivalent efforts, determining whether a humanity and seriousness concerning the representation of large-scale violence will be the new cinematic order or whether Hollywood will manufacture the usual entertainments in an updated guise.

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Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.2 (Spring 2007), 60-61.