Children of Men

On Christmas Day I went to a movie about an inexplicable, miraculous pregnancy and the child who birth brings hope to a fallen and dying world. No, I didn't go to The Nativity Story; I saw Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men.

Children of Men is an apocalyptic dystopia film set a bit in the future in a world in which all humanity has become infertile. For nearly two decades there have been no births. Society has broken down from the despair that follows the realization that, because no one is being born, humanity is doomed and the end is literally within our lifetime. Britain (the setting of the story) claims to be the only remaining bastion of civilization, but what we see is not civil at all. Assisted suicide kits are distributed by the government and advertised on every billboard. There is racism and oppression in every corner. Immigrants bear the brunt of all the frustration of this dying world. They are rounded up and caged, eventually taken to "refugee centers" that look like a combination of the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo.

It is in this world of death that Theo is recruited by a band of revolutionaries to get traveling papers for Kee, a young refugee woman. He can only get joint papers, so he must escort her to wherever she is to be taken. He has no idea why she is important, but he needs the money. When he meets her, he discovers that she is pregnant -- the first pregnancy anywhere in the world in eighteen years. Soon he is on the run with her, trying to protect her from all who want the child for their own purposes. It is obvious that this child represents the hope of the world -- governments and rebels alike want to claim that hope for their cause. His goal is to deliver Kee to The Human Project, a scientific group rumored to exist that is seeking a way to restart humanity.

Seeing it on Christmas certainly made me aware of the many ways the film wants to mirror the coming of Christ. An unmarried woman pregnant with a miracle child, an arduous journey, a birth in squalor, a image of adoration, a breaking in of peace, and even an equivalent of the flight to Egypt all mirror stories of Jesus' birth. For those who miss these subtleties, every time someone sees Kee's swollen belly they exclaim, "Jesus Christ!" All who know about the pregnancy see this child as a kind of messiah, but they want to interpret that messiah in light of their own goals.

This film has the basic worldview found in apocalyptic literature, such as the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Apocalypses see the world as near destruction and unable to find its way back. But apocalyptic literature is really not about destruction, it is about the revealing of hope. Children of Men is, in the end, a story about hope in the midst of worldwide decay.

What makes the film work so well as apocalypse is that it shows touches of much of the unrest and turmoil of the present time. We see religious extremism, xenophobia, prejudice, terrorism, brutality under the guise of "homeland security," and a culture of death. This is not just the result of a childless world. When we see the many refugees and the way they are treated, it seems as real as the nightly news from Iraq, but also harkens back to the Holocaust. Many of the refugees speak with eastern European accents; one of the key characters in the refugee camp seems to be Roma. The culture of death that is so prevalent in the film is really the extension of where the world has been headed for many years. (Ah, that apocalyptic worldview!)

It is easy to wonder, in light of so much that is wrong with the world (and everything that is wrong in the film's future society is already present in ours), if there is any future for humanity. The film posits a time when there literally is no future. It is the future itself, represented in a pregnancy, that provides hope.

Although it is possible to read a divine hand into the story, this is a very humanistic apocalypse. We never learn why or how the time of infertility came about, but the depravity that grew from that hopelessness is certainly the outgrowth of the dark side within us all. We also never learn how Kee's pregnancy came about. But it really doesn't matter. It is the mere fact that she is pregnant and that life will go on that brings all the hope that the world needs to begin anew. The struggle still goes on, but the promise of a future brings it all to a pause, if only momentarily. Our hope, like our trouble, is ultimately found in ourselves.

But as I watched it on Christmas, it was good to remember the One who is my hope -- the One in whom my future and present find their meaning.