Saw Children of Men again the other night and with each rewatch and with the little Easter eggs sprinkled in the movie, Alfonso Cuaron’s 06 movie isn’t just so eerie given that its set in 2025, but that so much of what happened there has the literal same parallels, almost to the T.
The infertility thing has already happened albeit for totally different reasons. Rampant gutting of welfare systems, stagnating wages and rising costs just simply take the place of whatever ‘illness’ caused the infertility in the movie.
The rest are mirror for mirror likenesses. The billionaires living in ever-shrinking wealthy parts of the city while the rest of the cities fall into disrepair, collapse, and urban decay thanks to years of government bureaucracy and gutting of state welfare. That scene where the lead is driving through a crime riddled London only to then head into The Mall passed Admiralty Arch in London into a city that’s almost in a different dimension. Literally the same as today with ever expanding homelessness encampments in some major cities while billionaires score even bigger paydays.
The movie also encapsulates perfectly how as society collapses, man always has the tendency to turn on himself. The migrants become the scapegoats. And with immigration now a hot button issue, the overlap is eerie. Migration coupled with stagnating welfare for its citizens lead to the classic red herring of all immigrants are the root cause of all suffering. All while the rich get richer and incite culture wars through their ownership of the free press. This results in folks to seek out extreme ideologies, often times ‘the right’ and now here we are at the brink of a right wing scare for the next elections. The US already deep in it. France in 2027, Germany in 2029 as well as the UK.
The movie is shot right in the phase of the ‘weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men’ cycle of society and we can argue that despite the rampant feeling of sadness, the post-08 hyper fuelled low interest rate money injected economies of the 2012s up until even the post COVID bump, society has largely ignored such grave issues and instead we’ve let the oligarchs stifle our knowledge by controlling areas of the free press and even with shite like TikTok brain.
Another thing is how in the movie we see ads that casually show that euthanasia has been normalised. And while sure its great to let folks die with dignity in the case of terminal illnesses, in this case its different. The rich will only be too happy to see the poor and starving die off. If not by forever wars then hey, here’s a pill to kill yourself.
We’re now right at the endgame of it. AI, rising unemployment, red hot bond rates all while the ruling 1% own more wealth than roughly 86% of the US.
Cuaron’s 2006 movie is just beyond sensational in how he’s encapsulated the very worst of man including that one iconic scene in the third act where for just a split second there’s a pause in fighting based on what they see, before then resuming the bloodshed aimlessly.
I also love the pacing, the colour palette, each character’s well designed backstories, the emotional threads of each character and also the little Easter eggs thrown in (from the bus intercom ads, to the chatbot AI sex ads to the kid with the TikTok brain computer in the billionaire’s home and ultimately to the fact that in one shot we see one of the characters wearing an ‘old London 2012 Olympics’ tee even though this movie would be out six years prior (the Olympic bids were announced at that point).
A must watch movie that everyone should view once and then once more.
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