Dystopian films and novels are not known for their subtlety. They tend to take one pet concept and hammer it home until your brain feels like it's hemorrhaging grape juice. (Technology BAD! Nuclear weapons BAD!) Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men is a different story altogether. Based on the novel by P.D. James, it's a dystopian story that is not so much interested in the causes of humanity's predicament as in the humans themselves. It's not a manifesto or a parchment containing Martin Luther's 95 Theses. It's not one big chorus of "You'll notice this was all caused by Items 1, 2, and 3 on your Dystopian Checklist." There are explanations as to why the world has come to this, but they aren't discussed at length in the film because they don't really matter. We know there was a massive flu epidemic in 2008. We know that sometime after that women began having miscarriages and then they were no longer conceiving at all. We know that the governments of the world began to collapse (due to despair about the world's future, one would assume), except for Britain. We know that Britain managed to retain control by extricating itself from the chaos of the world, which would only be possible because it is an island and inherently defensible. We know that by 2027--the time the movie is set--there are zillions of people trying to get into this last bastion of civilization, and we know that the British government takes all of them and imprisons them in refugee facilities that are really no more than concentration camps. We don't waste time rehashing how exactly this all came to pass, how personal rights and dignities were sacrificed, how it worsened degree by degree. We accept the premise because it's credible, because we all know this is how people (and governments) react when they feel threatened. The only detail that really matters in terms of the story is that there hasn't been a child born in eighteen years, and there is a profound deficit of hope.

I should add that in this disintegrating future world, there are animals everywhere. Cats, dogs, birds, goats, even deer--everywhere. Whatever happened to fertility, it happened only to humans.

The movie opens by telling us of the death of Baby Diego, the world's youngest person, who was stabbed to death by an enraged fan when refusing to sign an autograph. He was 18. Weary-looking people come in off the dirty London streets to watch the reports on flat-screen televisions. Some of them are crying, some don't even have the energy for that. This is a time when the human race is on its way to extinction. Suicide pills are distributed freely (under the product name Quietus, no less), and it's not uncommon for a bomb to explode in your coffee shop right after you leave. It's the bleakest of futures. Those who keep on living are doing so out of habit.

The movie chronicles the efforts of former anti-government activist Theo (Clive Owen) as he tries to transport a young refugee woman to the care of the Human Project, an ultra-secret group of scientists who study fertility. He's recruited for this task by his ex-lover Julian (Julianne Moore), who is the leader of a radical pro-immigrant organization called The Fishes. What's the reason for this mission? Well, it turns out that Kee (the awesome Clare-Hope Ashitey) is pregnant. Julian believes that the Human Project is the only place where Kee and her baby can be safe, where Kee's fertility can be studied by people who could use that knowledge to provide a future for the human race, and where the baby will not be used as a political pawn. Naturally, this proves to be a dangerous and difficult task. They have to steer clear of the authorities (the army is everywhere), and along the way find themselves at the mercy of a series of strangers, many of whom are not remotely trustworthy. This is an oft-underlined theme in the film, the idea that our very existence can hang on the actions our fellow human beings. It's easy to forget this as we sit at our separate desks and go home to our separate houses, but more often than not we truly have each other's lives in our hands. After all, a society is just a collection of agreed-upon behaviors, and it's a damn fragile thing. Generosity may flourish when things are going well, but as soon as people feel personally endangered, the niceties tend to go out the window.

Jasper Palmer, friend of Theo and former political cartoonist, is one of the few reliable people in the film. I've never been a huge fan of Michael Caine, but I adored him in this role. He's wonderful here: warm, clever, funny, unafraid of a good bodily function joke, and seemingly the last peaceful protester on the earth. Jasper may not have been an authentic first-generation hippie, but he definitely embodies that era's spirit of resistance and dissent. He lives in a remote forest area with his miniature ganja plantation and his wife, who is catatonic. Some newspaper clippings on the wall reveal that she used to be a photojournalist and that she was tortured, but nothing else about this is explained. What matters is that it happened and now she is how she is. Anyway, it's clear that Jasper still loves her. He talks to her and feeds her and is so tender with her that it practically breaks your heart. It's true--Michael Caine has finally won me over. The character he plays is not that of the archetypal hippie sage, who has transcended the follies of humankind and is in the film only to function as a sounding board for the protagonist. Nor is he some kind of blind Tiresias forecasting future events. He's purely human, both noble and flawed, and that's why his choice to resist oppression is meaningful. His very existence constitutes a kind of hope.

Children of Men has none of the rich, earthy tones and vibrant hues of Alfonso Cuaron's earlier works, like Y tu mama tambien. Everything is sort of washed out in appearance, as if the color drained out of the world right along with people's dreams. But the landscape of the film is fascinating, especially where it draws us to notice the intersection of futuristic-looking technology with flagrant decay. The bureaucratic offices contain sleek, partly holographic computers, but the buses and trains everyone rides around in are old and run-down. The cars have a science fiction-y shape to them, but they too appear to be falling apart. You get the feeling nothing new will ever be built. Early in the film, Theo (whose name, you'll recall, translates to God) seeks help from a wealthy cousin who has filled his house with priceless works of art. Michelangelo's David stands in the entryway, his lower left leg blown off. Picasso's Guernica is the backdrop for his dinner table (don't get me started--Guernica is the ideal metaphor for this movie's premise, and I don't want to get too geeky on you all by rambling on and on about it). And something else. While Theo is asking his cousin why he collects these artifacts when pretty soon no one will be around to appreciate them (his response is "I just don't think about it"), you can see through the window a parade-sized inflatable pig hovering over the city. It's an unexpected, surreal tribute to the album cover of Pink Floyd's Animals, and it conveys some of the strangeness of being part of a doomed race that has nevertheless managed to produce so many masterpieces. This idea alone could inspire a dissertation: What is the significance of art when its creators are dying out? And it might only be my imagination, but the balloon also seems to be invoking the spirit of "Animal Farm," George Orwell's dystopian novel about pigs who throw off the shackles of the unjust humans only to become cruel and callous and generally indistinguishable from their former captors. There's a lot of that sort of thing going on with this movie, and it's especially evident in the presence of the Fishes, who started out resisting and gradually evolved into full-on terrorist activities.

Let me briefly mention the use of music in this film. It's thoughtful and elegaic and not overdone. However, I could kill Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for writing "Ruby Tuesday," which makes me cry even when it's not juxtaposed over a scene like the one in the film. I could kill you as well, Alfonso. It wasn't fair to plug that into this movie where you did. Those of us with tender souls never had a chance.

I'm sure it's obvious by now, but Children of Men isn't a film you should bring your children to, even if you think they're not going to pay attention. To say that this film is disturbing is like saying that Jack the Ripper dabbled in crime. There's a whole lot of extremely troubling Holocaust-type stuff here, and also some stuff that could be straight out of the Abu Ghraib photo files. I won't lie to you; it's awful. But it's not gratuitous. It's just brief, brutal, and real.

I haven't talked about Clive Owen yet, but he's perfect in this role. He has a weary and weathered look about him, the classic noirish anti-hero, but he also exhibits an underlying integrity that he seems to wish he didn't have (he knows that life would be a thousand times easier without a conscience). His performance is understated and sincere, and his scenes with Julianne Moore are wonderful. They capture the complex nature of relationships, especially between two people who used to live together but haven't see one another for years. It's revealed that their relationship fell apart shortly after their baby died in the flu pandemic--their life together couldn't survive their grief--but you can see that they still have affection for each other. At times they even lapse into moments of playfulness. And then a seemingly innocent conversation will touch on wounds that have never quite healed, and tempers will ignite in the space of a moment. They are beautiful and broken and so very much like the rest of us. This is one of the things I love about this movie--the whole story is so bleak, bleak as hell in fact, but it's shot through with so much genuine humanity that you feel even more acutely what it means for our species to die out. We're leaving behind wars and evil and torture, but we're also losing marvelous things like Michelangelo and curry chicken and true love. There is a scene toward the end (SPOILER!) where Theo and Kee are stumbling out of a bombed out refugee building with the baby Kee had the night before. The only way out is through the soldiers, who have been pretty much killing every refugee on sight for the past three hours. It's clear that this may be the end of everything, the end of hope. They have no idea what will happen. But they walk out anyway because there is nothing else to do but keep going. Slowly, slowly, they walk down the stairs, bullets flying into the windows and explosions on every side, out of the building. The baby is crying and swaddled in a blanket, her tiny, fragile body a stark contrast to the devastation all around. Seeing this, the soldiers stop dead in their tracks. They don't move to stop them, they just stand and watch, the war at hand utterly forgotten for the moment. Some of them cross themselves. It's like a refashioned nativity scene, and it will take your breath away.

Children of Men shows us what a precarious thing it is to be alive, even in the best of circumstances. But for all its grimness, the film seems to believe we're worth saving. We just have to believe it ourselves. Highly recommended!