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“Last One to Die Turn off the Lights” – Review of Movie “Children of Men”

Christian theme of original novel replaced by anti-American, Anti-Bush/Iraq War rant

by Hilary White

TORONTO, January 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – What will the end of the world be like? Will it end with a “bang or a whimper?” For decades we have been pre-occupied with the twin bogymen of environmental collapse or nuclear war. But what if there is a third monster lurking even deeper in the collective conscience of the West, a creature worse than either Scylla or Charybdis? What if we just wink out of existence?

The film adaptation of the P.D. James dystopian novel, Children of Men, has a premise that is starting to loom large in some minds, especially in Europe: what if we can’t make any more babies? In less than twenty year’s time, the film proposes, women will be entirely unable to conceive and universal ennui and (for some reason) violence, will settle over the human race as it contemplates its doom.

It is a shame that the filmmakers were more interested in making yet another piece of anti-American, Anti-Bush/Iraq agitprop than in telling P.D. James’ subtle and personal story of courage and faith. The film, which opened in North America on Christmas day, (another not-very-subtle message… a baby will save the world, get it? But just a regular baby this time) offered little new in the way of exploration of the big issues threatening western society.

The “theme of hope,” much-ballyhoooed in the British reviews (it opened in the UK in October) is lost in a confusing maze of bullet-pocked concrete and inexplicable alliances and betrayals, all filmed in fashionable but seasick-making “documentary” jiggly-camera style, with lots of wide-angle shots of corpses and scary news broadcasts playing in the background.

The film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and written by a committee of five, shows us a grim, monochromatic dystopic future of an England under siege from without and in despair within. Graffiti sprayed on a wall sums up the national mood, “Last one to die, please turn off the lights.”

The situation in the rest of the world is worse, and millions of illegal immigrants are clawing to get into Britain whose totalitarian government is systematically exporting them back to the (presumably radioactive) hellholes of New York, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris and Brussels.

The Brits, however, “soldier on,” that is, they keep up appearances, keep going to work, buying their coffee in the morning, riding the Tube, reading the Guardian, all under the pall of a paranoid anti-immigrant lockdown of martial law and totalitarianism. The innocent people being brutally rounded up and transported and suspended civil freedoms take a mental back seat to the utter despair produced by universal infertility.

If the movie had been about the loss of hope and the loss of a future in a childless world, it might have had something new and useful to say. But it quickly degenerated into a violent rant about the evils of right-wingism and the supposed racism of the War on Terror. Leftist boilerplate, in other words, which reduced an interesting and promising idea to the realm of trite and earnest preaching. If I had wanted to read another anti-George Bush/Iraq War rant, I would have paid a toonie for a copy of the New York Times.

The film’s shortcomings, its earnest preaching on the evils of right-wing racism, its ridiculously implausible British police state, could have been redeemed had it been bolstered by some kind of character development. But the hero, Theo, seems to learn nothing and grow not a whit, while the baby and her mother are a mere plot device. I’ll give it away by saying everyone else dies.

Not all films have to have an overarching moral theme. But the absence of any discernible purpose to the story was, despite the constant violence and incomprehensible chase scenes and annoying camera work, its greatest shortcoming.

The writers, apparently desperate to have it all mean something, (anything, as long as it isn’t the Christian theme of the novel) invented the “Human Project” a collection of the world’s “greatest scientific minds” working to solve the infertility crisis – as if governments, bent only on persecuting immigrants and being generally wicked and right wing – just hadn’t thought of it.

Ah, the glories of rationalistic humanity coming to the rescue. Richard Dawkins would be proud. But the Human Project, an almost entirely invisible secret group, fails to serve a discernible plot purpose, even that of deus ex machina.

Statistics certainly show that the European “baby bust” is a serious and grossly under-rated threat worthy of serious cinematic exploration. Sooner than anyone wants to imagine, the “English,” the “French,” the “Germans,” the “Spaniards,” all those descended genetically from the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Allemani, and other ethnic groupings and languages that we think of as “European”, along with their cultural achievements - will be gone.

The Canadian writer and doomsayer Mark Steyn pointed out in a recent article that the median age of French women, that is those women in France who are of that first ethnic, Gallic stock, is past childbearing age. For the French, recovery now seems all but impossible.

Why doesn’t someone make a movie about that?

P.D. James wrote a pretty good book about it in 1992. It’s called Children of Men, published by Vintage Canada. Spending the 12 dollars towards the book rather than the film is highly recommended.

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