Hope and faith
Children of Men explores the themes of hope and faith[54] in the face of overwhelming futility and despair.[55][29] The film's source, P. D. James' novel The Children of Men (1992), describes what happens when society is unable to reproduce, using male infertility to explain this problem.[56][57] In the novel, it is made clear that hope depends on future generations. James writes "It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words 'justice', 'compassion', 'society’, 'struggle', 'evil', would be unheard echoes on an empty air."[58]
The film does not explain the cause of the infertility, although environmental destruction and divine punishment are considered.[29][59][60] Cuarón has attributed this unanswered question (and others in the film) to his dislike for purely expository film: "There's a kind of cinema I detest, which is a cinema that is about exposition and explanations ... It's become now what I call a medium for lazy readers ... Cinema is a hostage of narrative. And I'm very good at narrative as a hostage of cinema."[61] Cuarón's disdain for back-story and exposition led him to use the concept of infertility as a "metaphor for the fading sense of hope".[61][59] The "almost mythical" Human Project is turned into a "metaphor for the possibility of the evolution of the human spirit, the evolution of human understanding".[62] Cuarón believed that explaining things such as the cause of the infertility and the Human Project would create a "pure science-fiction movie", removing focus from the story as a metaphor for hope.[63][59] Without dictating how the audience should feel by the end of the film, Cuarón encourages viewers to come to their own conclusions about the sense of hope depicted in the final scenes: "We wanted the end to be a glimpse of a possibility of hope, for the audience to invest their own sense of hope into that ending. So if you're a hopeful person you'll see a lot of hope, and if you're a bleak person you'll see a complete hopelessness at the end."[26]
Religion
Richard Blake, writing for Catholic magazine America, suggested that like Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's The Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the crux of the journey in Children of Men lies in what is uncovered along the path rather than the terminus itself.[33] Ethan Alter, reviewing the film for Film Journal International, describes Theo's heroic journey to the coast as mirroring his personal quest for "self-awareness",[64] a journey that takes him from "despair to hope."[65]
According to Cuarón, the title of P. D. James' book (The Children of Men) is an allegory derived from a passage of scripture in the Bible.[66] (Psalm 90 (89):3 of the King James Version: "Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men") James refers to her story as a "Christian fable"[56] while Cuarón describes it as "almost like a look at Christianity": "I didn't want to shy away from the spiritual archetypes", Cuarón told Filmmaker Magazine. "But I wasn't interested in dealing with dogma."[26]
Ms. James's nativity story is, in Mr. Cuarón's version, set against the image of a prisoner in an orange smock with a black bag on his head, arms stretched out as if on a cross.
— Manohla Dargis, [67]
This divergence from the original was criticised by some, including Anthony Sacramone of First Things, who called the film "an act of vandalism", noting the irony of how Cuarón had removed religion from P.D. James' fable, in which morally sterile nihilism is overcome by Christianity.[68]
The film has been noted for its use of Christian symbolism; for example, British terrorists named "Fishes" protect the rights of refugees.[69] Opening on Christmas Day in the United States, critics compared the characters of Theo and Kee with Joseph and Mary,[70] calling the film a "modern-day Nativity story".[71] Kee's pregnancy is revealed to Theo in a barn, alluding to the manger of the Nativity scene; when Theo asks Kee who the father of the baby is she jokingly states she is a virgin; and when other characters discover Kee and her baby, they respond with "Jesus Christ" or the sign of the cross.[72]
To highlight these spiritual themes, Cuarón commissioned a 15-minute piece by British composer John Tavener, a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church whose work resonates with the themes of "motherhood, birth, rebirth, and redemption in the eyes of God". Calling his score a "musical and spiritual reaction to Alfonso's film", snippets of Tavener's "Fragments of a Prayer" contain lyrics in Latin, German and Sanskrit sung by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly. Words like "mata" (mother), "pahi mam" (protect me), "avatara" (saviour), and "alleluia" appear throughout the film.[73][74]
In the closing credits, the Sanskrit words "Shantih Shantih Shantih" appear as end titles.[75][76] Writer and film critic Laura Eldred of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill observes that Children of Men is "full of tidbits that call out to the educated viewer". During a visit to his house by Theo and Kee, Jasper says "Shanti, shanti, shanti". Eldred notes that the "shanti" used in the film is also found at the end of an Upanishad and in the final line of T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, a work Eldred describes as "devoted to contemplating a world emptied of fertility: a world on its last, teetering legs". "Shanti" is also a common beginning and ending to all Hindu prayers, and means "peace", referencing the invocation of divine intervention and rebirth through an end to violence.[77]
Contemporary references
Children of Men takes an unconventional approach to the modern action film, using a documentary, newsreel style.[78] Film critics Michael Rowin, Jason Guerrasio and Ethan Alter observe the film's underlying touchstone of immigration.
For Alter and other critics, the structural support and impetus for the contemporary references rests upon the visual nature of the film's exposition, occurring in the form of imagery as opposed to conventional dialogue.[64] Other popular images appear, such as a sign over the refugee camp reading "Homeland Security".[79] The similarity between the hellish, cinéma vérité stylized battle scenes of the film and current news and documentary coverage of the Iraq War, is noted by film critic Manohla Dargis, describing Cuarón's fictional landscapes as "war zones of extraordinary plausibility".[80]
In the film, refugees are "hunted down like cockroaches", rounded up and put into roofless cages open to the elements and camps, and even shot, leading film critics like Chris Smith and Claudia Puig to observe symbolic "overtones" and images of the Holocaust.[55][81] This is reinforced in the scene where an elderly refugee woman speaking German is seen detained in a cage,[35] and in the scene where British government agents strip and assault refugees; the song "Arbeit Macht Frei" by The Libertines, from Arbeit macht frei, plays in the background.[82] "The visual allusions to the Nazi round-ups are unnerving", writes Richard A. Blake. "It shows what people can become when the government orchestrates their fears for its own advantage."[33]
Cuarón explains how he uses imagery in his fictional and futuristic events to allude to real, contemporary or historical incidents and beliefs,
They exit the Russian apartments, and the next shot you see is this woman wailing, holding the body of her son in her arms. This was a reference to a real photograph of a woman holding the body of her son in the Balkans, crying with the corpse of her son. It's very obvious that when the photographer captured that photograph, he was referencing La Pietà, the Michelangelo sculpture of Mary holding the corpse of Jesus. So: We have a reference to something that really happened, in the Balkans, which is itself a reference to the Michelangelo sculpture. At the same time, we use the sculpture of David early on, which is also by Michelangelo, and we have of course the whole reference to the Nativity. And so everything was referencing and cross-referencing, as much as we could.[16]
Academic analysis
Several academics have thoroughly examined the themes of the film, with a primary focus on Alfonso Cuarón's creation of a dystopian landscape. One prominent aspect explored is the treatment of refugees, illustrating the regulation of life and the authoritarian tendencies mirrored in the extreme policies of the British government depicted in the film.[83] Additionally, Marcus O'Donnell, a researcher, has characterized the film's political realism as a form of "visionary realism," encompassing various apocalyptic events rather than a singular one.[84] Moreover, the film delves into the notion of political protection juxtaposed with physical life, particularly evident in its exploration of the status of the unborn child. Kee's body serves as the battleground for these conflicting forces, offering a critique of migration politics while simultaneously idealizing the future child.[85]
