Watched on Blu-Ray

The world is going to the dogs. Slowly. Creeping. Yet unmistakable to everyone. Although civilisation in 2027 is already in a state of emergency, wars, catastrophes and misery have (apparently) devastated many parts of the planet, there will be no immediate, tangible or possibly still avoidable threat that will seal the fate of humanity. Instead of the tendency towards collapse due to overpopulation, the wheel in "Children of Men" turns the other way round or has come to a complete standstill for 18 years: No more children are being born. Can no longer be born. Why? It is not known. An entire generation has already ceased to exist, and there is no hope of improvement in sight. How could it be in a world whose focus has long ceased to be on preserving its own kind, the train seems to have sailed. Capitulating before the inexplicable situation, people prefer to shut themselves off and try to maintain the hypocrisy of a functional society. Which inevitably means excluding, deporting and destroying everything that is branded as a hostile element without any empirical principle. We are not the problem, so it must be the others.

Two years after the Mexican Alfonso Cuarón was allowed to make his first, big Hollywood blockbuster with "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", he did not stay in the track of simple-minded mainstream cinema with this novel adaptation of the same name, although the film is of course anything but a niche or independent production. A big-budget project with a budget of 76 million dollars, the popcorn quickly gets stuck in your throat. Instead of consistently compatible mass entertainment - which would have been easy to squeeze out of the original in the hands of many producers and directors - Cuarón manages the enormously difficult balancing act of thoroughly respectable genre cinema and profound dystopia about a society staring into the abyss, which in the face of viscous extinction has nothing better to do than accelerate its demise with waving flags. To dehumanise itself even more than nature (?) or whoever seems to have intended anyway. The global epidemic of infertility could almost only be used as a MacGuffin (we don't go that far), because ultimately the film doesn't investigate the causes, it deals with how we deal with the situation and describes mechanisms of panic and hopelessness that have cooled down in the meantime, which find expression in a frighteningly realistic scenario.

A film that is not only almost political, but also takes up shock images from Guantanamo that were familiar at the time and reaches almost prophetic dimensions in relation to the current refugee "problem". Good science fiction usually takes its cue from distant but not so far-fetched predictions of the future, which can ideally have a cautionary effect, and if Children of Men is ever to be rediscovered or discovered in general, it is most definitely now. All this takes place in a distant context, but nevertheless reflects (in)human behaviour when an undeniable, concrete threat is carried out on the backs of the weak and those in need of help, which makes no sense whatsoever and only stirs up hatred and fear. A simple "solution" to an insoluble problem. Apart from its main plot, the struggle for a possible future, "Children of Men" shows even more clearly how repressive, self-destructive and primitive the human species deals with it. They would rather nail the rebirth of humanity as a political trophy in front of their own gate, instead of at least now finally pulling together. To harness a baby - THE baby - as a symbol before the other side does. It's a shame that this isn't even that far-fetched, like everything else in this film.

Regardless of the scope of the content, which is underpinned by haunting snapshots (a primary school seems like an overgrown, the loneliest place on earth, a relic ripe for a museum), this non-action-oriented work contains fantastic, almost perfect action sequences that can easily be used as reference material. Hardly any pure action film can match it. In the first half, there is a sequence in which the camera handles like a stowaway in a crowded small car without visible editing, reproducing the impact of the situation unfiltered. Of course, this is an illusion, just like the grandiose steady-cam chase during the riot chaos towards the end, but it is the perfect illusion. Comparable to Hitchcock's "Rope", only even more mature, no longer even to be guessed at with the naked eye. Planned sequence or fake, it doesn't matter, also and especially because of the divine Emmanuel Lubezki, whose camera work is once again outstanding. Always, not only during Peak Time. Through images, their transported mood and the smooth motion sequences, which seem to be cast from one mould, an inimitable middle-of-the-pack feeling unfolds, close to the upper limit of modern cinematography. What Cuarón's "Gravity" made into a simply knitted but grippingly performed event, "Children of Men" is so casually incidental, only as a partial aspect. That's really impressive!