Dir. Alfonso Cuaron UK/US, 2006, 109 mins
Cast: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine
Review by Carol Allen
This is the sort of intelligent science fiction, like say Gattaca, which takes what is happening in today's world and projects it into a possible future. Cuaron and co-writer Timothy J. Sexton take us a mere twenty-one years forward to 2027, when most of us will still be alive, into a world where the human species has lost the ability to reproduce. The youngest person on the planet is eighteen years old. Britain has become a fortified island with a stringent anti-immigration policy against the floods of refugees streaming in from the unspecified conflicts in Europe and Africa, who are rounded up, herded into concentration camps and forcibly deported or worse.
At the centre of the story is Theo (Owen), a cynical bureaucrat who has cut himself off emotionally from the world around him. Until he is hijacked by Julian (Moore), his former lover from his activist youth. She is the leader of a resistance group fighting for the rights of the immigrants and she bribes him to obtain transit papers to get refugee Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) safely out of the country. It is only once Theo has been drawn into the plan, which is to deliver Kee to a mysterious off shore group, the Human Project, which is trying to find a way to save humanity, that he realises why Kee is so important. She is pregnant, carrying the first child to be conceived for nearly twenty years. And meanwhile the resistance, now led by Julian's second-in-command, Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), have their own agenda involving Kee.
Cuaron has created an unsettlingly convincing future Britain, using many London landmarks, which are the backdrop for grimy, decrepit buses, rubbish strewn streets, armed police and soldiers milling about menacingly and monitor screens everywhere churning out anti refugee propaganda. The camera work too adds to the feeling of unease, taking us right into the thick of the action, much of it from Theo's point of view. Particularly noteworthy are a couple of innovative car chases and what I have christened the Battle of Bexhill between the rebels and the authorities, with Theo and Kee caught in the middle. I was also very struck by a derelict school, where Theo, Kee and Pam Ferris as Kee's companion hide at one point. Tattered children's drawings on the wall, rusting swings in the playground, bringing home visually that this is a world without children. Owen, who is in virtually every scene, is terrific, initially exuding cynicism from every pore, then gradually allowing the man he once was to emerge, while Caine as Theo's old friend Jasper, with whom Theo reminisces about the old days, gives a totally engaging performance as an ageing hippy former political cartoonist living a defiantly independent existence hidden away in the forest. There are also strong supporting performances from Danny Huston making an impact in one just scene as Theo's cousin, holding court in the Ministry of Arts, known to us as Tate Modern, and Peter Mullan as a mercurial contact of Jasper, who helps the runaways but at a price.
My one quibble with the film is that I wanted to know more about what was happening in the outside world which had created this situation, particularly as I'm told the writers created a complete twenty year "history" before starting the script. There are intriguing hints, like a reference to some unspecified disaster in New York. And yet it’s appropriate because in real life as opposed to movies, people don’t recite the history of the last twenty years, they just refer to it obliquely as here.
As I left the cinema, my companion remarked that thank goodness, it couldn't actually happen. Really? The spectre of identity cards is not dead, just sleeping; Eastern European EC citizens and young Muslims are regarded with suspicion and fear; civil liberties are being eroded in the name of necessary security precautions; from next summer citizens will be offered a special hotline to report to the authorities people they see breaking the new anti-smoking regulations - what snitch next? And more and more couples are having to resort to fertility treatment. This film raises an interesting question: what is the future that we are creating now?
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