Alfonso Cuarón's near-future dystopia. The road-ambush sequence and the Bexhill battle are still the most-imitated long takes of the 21st century.
London, 2027. No child has been born anywhere in the world for eighteen years. Society has collapsed in most countries; the United Kingdom is one of the last functioning states, maintained by an authoritarian government and an aggressive anti-immigration policy. The youngest person in the world, an eighteen-year-old man named Diego, has just been killed.
Theo Faron, a former activist now working a desk job, is recruited by his ex-wife Julian (now leading an underground refugee-rights group) to escort a young refugee named Kee to a coastal rendezvous with the mythical Human Project. Kee is, impossibly, pregnant. The film follows Theo, Kee, and a small group of helpers across England as the refugee situation collapses around them.
Children of Men contains two of the most-technically-ambitious long takes in 21st-century cinema. The first is a 4-minute scene in which Theo, Julian, and three companions drive through wooded English roads and are ambushed by armed insurgents. The shot was achieved with a custom-built camera rig (the 'Doggicam') that could move around the cabin and through windows of a real moving car, with no cuts.
The second is the 6-minute Bexhill battle, in which Theo runs through an active urban combat zone trying to protect Kee and her newborn. The shot includes explosions, bullets, blood splatter on the lens, and choreographed extras at multiple distances. Both takes are doing dramatic work: the road ambush establishes that the world's danger is unmediated, the Bexhill battle establishes that the war is total.
Emmanuel Lubezki, Cuarón's longtime collaborator, shot Children of Men in a documentary register — handheld, available light, deep focus, with grade choices that emphasise greens and greys. The cinematography is foundational to the film's argument: a near-future dystopia that does not look science-fictional but looks like a slightly worse version of right now.
The world-building is among the most-detailed in modern science fiction. Adverts for suicide pills run on London buses. Posters for 'the Human Project' are graffiti'd over with the words 'Last One to Die Please Turn Out the Lights'. The Tate Modern has become a private fortress where what remains of European cultural treasures are stored. Almost none of this is explained in dialogue; it accumulates from background detail. Cuarón has talked about being influenced by the way news footage from Iraq, the Balkans, and Latin America showed contemporary collapse — the film treats London in 2027 as a place that has already passed through the kinds of disasters those places have.
Children of Men was a commercial disappointment in 2006, making roughly $70m on a $76m budget. Its reputation has grown steadily since. Slavoj Žižek has written about it; academic film studies have produced an extensive secondary literature on it; the film is now widely regarded as one of the foundational science-fiction films of the 21st century.
The film's politics — its depiction of refugee crisis, authoritarian response, ecological collapse — have aged in unsettling ways. The 'fish' rebel faction inside the film, the militarised border policy, the visual rhetoric of caged refugees in roadside detention zones — none of this read as immediate metaphor in 2006. By the 2015 European refugee crisis, the film looked like a documentary. By the 2025 anti-immigration policy debates in multiple Western countries, it looks like a textbook.