As you may know the world is slowly becoming over populated. Companies are selling products to keep woman from being pregnant and a woman can abort an unwanted pregnancy. There are so many options to stop a pregnancy, but what if we didn’t have to stop pregnancies. What if woman could no longer become pregnant? Children of Men explores that idea and a few more. The film Children of Men is based on the novel with the same name written by P.D. James. The book and film is about a man who has to help the first pregnant woman in 18 years leave the country to a safe location so she can raise her child. The two versions are a bit different from each other but both are quite good. The film takes on different political stance, more on what’s going on in the world today.

One of the themes the movie explores is, illegal immigrants. Any person who is even thought to be an illegal immigrant is arrested and put into a holding cage in the middle of the city and after that brought to a prison camp. The reason for brining up illegal immigrants in the movie is not only is the US having an immigrant problem, but Britain (the country where the book and movie takes place in) has a huge immigrant problem. The movie shows the viewers just what could happen if the government lost their mentality and over reacted to the problem.

Another theme is terrorism. Her there are two sides of the terrorism. The first side is the government. Not only are the citizens in constant threat and fear because the country has turned into a dystopian world, but the government wants it’s citizens to be in constant fear so to keep them in better control. One of the methods of keeping them this way is to stage terrorist attacks. Ever once in awhile a bomb will go off in a public place like a convince store. This theme can be found in other movies such as Brazil, which also focuses on a dystopian future.

The other side of terrorism is the resistance force which is combating against the government because of their tyrant control. The resistance force does not make attacks to put people in fear but to take down an evil government. That’s the difference between the good and the bad terrorists. The bad terrorists put innocent people in fear and the good terrorists put an evil government in fear because of their acts of fear.

On a filmmaking perspective Children of Men is an excellent movie. The look of the film captures the dystopian future with a dark gray and green tone and a high contrast. Giving the film this edge look keeps it from being a clean cut Hollywood movie and more of a real life look at what the world could look like. Another addition to keep away from the clean cut Hollywood movie is that just about 99% of the camera work is handheld. Instead of having smooth dolly shots or gliding steady cam shots the shots are jerky and shaky. But its not an over done shake like what you would find on shows like The Shield.

One of my favorites scenes involves a single shot of the main character Theo running through a war torn city as he makes his way to the pregnant women he’s taking care of. This scene really captures the feeling that this is actually happening since it uses the documentary style camera work. There are no cuts or edits to hide a mistake or a crane shot to make it look attractive. The filmmakers did not want what was going on in this movie to look attractive. They wanted to make it look like what it is, an ugly world. By having a single shot with no CGI or edits to give it a stylized look, they went for a bare bones approach and just followed the actor with the camera, which is what most of the movie is like. No fancy edits or beautiful crane shots. Just the actors and the camera