More than 10 years ago, when I first saw Children of Men (2006) in my sci-fi cinema class at the college, my first thought was the question “Is it really a sci-fi movie?” The question has remained to date. Not only have movie database sites like IMDb and Letterboxd placed it in the sci-fi genre (at least until the time of this writing) but a listicle in Collider included it in the 10 most grounded sci-fi movies. Say what?
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men is set in the year 2027 (still future at the time of this writing) when humans have lost the ability to conceive but somehow a young woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) in Britain gets pregnant and a bureaucrat named Theo (Clive Owen) is assigned to escort her to safety so that a group of scientists can study her and possibly find a solution to human infertility. Standing in Theo’s way is the violence of a war zone and a killer gang that wants to seize the pregnant woman for political reasons.
Setting a story in future doesn’t necessarily mean it’s become sci-fi, whether utopia or dystopia. Science fiction requires more detail in plot and character – mainly the theoretical basis of a problem or challenge presented in the plot, procedures and/or approaches to handle it, the reasons of success or failure of these efforts, and so on. In Children of Men, we don’t see these essentials fulfilled. The problem of infertility in the story is not approached scientifically, not even close.
Interestingly, science and religion are very often contrasted and spirituality is almost entirely associated with religion/faith – which has a greater representation in the movie. The sequence of escorting the pregnant woman through the crossfire with the scene of soldiers kneeling and crossing themselves to the cries of the newborn has vibes of the birth of Jesus and its spiritual power among the believers. Yet it’s not considered a faith-based film and rightfully so. There isn’t enough of the faith element in the story.
Children of Men is a great movie, very well-filmed, acted, and edited. But categorizing it as a sci-fi, let alone a top grounded one, seems forcing one’s arbitrariness of a label on it. Objectively, it can best fit the genres of political thriller and – to a fair degree – dark fantasy as it depicts a dystopian world foreboding violence and chaos surrounding the real-world issue of immigration from the underdeveloped world to the developed west. Wikipedia did a fair job on its description by calling it a “dystopian action thriller film,” though in no way am I agreeing with what the wiki page of the movie says about the political details of the plot.
