Children of Men is a movie about hope. About what might happen if we don’t have any, and what humanity might do to find it again. It posits a world 20 years hence, where women have ceased to reproduce, a place where industry runs free of environmental restraint, where fascist western governments detain foreigners in cages—a desperate society that has no future. Though in moments it thrills, like all great cinematic science fiction, it’s really a movie about ideas. In this case, the world depicted looks so familiar, evoking newsreels of World War II concentration camps and cable TV reports from Baghdad. The hypothetical blisters the skin of the frighteningly literal.
The film is a bit of an aberration in Hollywood. Not only is it exciting, smart and affecting, it’s hard science fiction: a story of an alternate or future reality rooted in detail, technology and philosophy in order to say something about the way we live today. It’s an endangered genre. Not in literature, mind you, where it thrives, but translating it to the big screen in a form that isn’t pure blockbuster escapism and special effects isn’t something one sees much anymore. As a recent article in Wired magazine called “Hollywood Eats Sci-Fi’s Brains” states, once you subtract the superhero and video game adaptations, there’s not much left.
Thankfully, a few filmmakers keep trying, despite box office disappointments. The Fountain, the wildly ambitious Darren Aronofsky three-timeline epic romance about the search for an end to death, opened last fall. The psychedelic visuals and ambiguous ending were called pretentious by many, but in a mainstream American film industry allergic to risk, when was the last time a major studio made such a seriously bizarre flight of fantasy? (They won’t be rushing out to do another anytime soon: the film was a bomb in theatres, its $35 million budget barely earning back $10 million at the box office.)
Steven Spielberg is probably the most reliable Hollywood director to bring both the spectacle that sells across the planet and the thought that gets you talking about the movie afterwards. His science fictions from 2001 and 2002, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, were both ambitious and considered, and his Close Encounters of the Third Kind aspired to other things quality science fiction can evoke in audiences: fear and wonder in the unknown.
Science fiction in the cinema has allegorical power, but it needs to be wielded as such. There were high hopes for Isaac Asimov’s milestone science fiction novel I, Robot when it was adapted—though, tellingly, the credit in the movie is “suggested by…”—in 2004 for the screen. Instead we got multiple scenes of Will Smith fighting off terabytes of computer-generated first-generation iMacs on legs.
The independent scene is where the smartest science fiction continues to come from, and where we’ll probably still have to look for it. In 2006 we got to see the discomfiting A Scanner Darkly, set in a California society addicted to a narcotic that provokes identity schism, directed by accomplished independent Richard Linklater and adapted from a book by influential paranoid futurist Philip K. Dick. The 2004 technological creepfest Primer, written and directed by Shane Carruth, was made on a shoestring and had more ideas in 10 seconds of its 77 minutes than most Hollywood future visions. Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from 2004, used science fiction to illustrate a truism that has rarely been explored in movies about love: given the chance, we’d relive our romances, even the ones that crashed and burned. Whether that’s uplifting or depressing, the filmmakers leave to you to reconcile. Gondry returned last year with The Science of Sleep, a lighter but still moving story of dreams, romance and machines that move you one second backwards in time.
The scarcity of these movies makes Alfonso Cuaron’s dystopic Children of Men that much more of a joy. Though maybe not jump-out-of-your-seats joy: the picture, though finally uplifting, is an implicit indictment of our ability to fuck up our planet and each other along the way. The presence of marquee faces Clive Owen and Julianne Moore in the cast guarantees a certain amount of attention, so with any luck the film will be a success, provoking more edgy science fiction cinema from the mainstream in the future. We can but hope.
Children of Men is in theatres now. See “Movie Times,” for more.
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2007.