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Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) is loosely based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. Cuarón is solidly Leftist, but Children of Men seems more and more like a Right-wing vision of dystopia with each passing year. (Cuarón’s 2001 film Y Tu Mamá También, is basically Marxist propaganda and soft-core porn, but his 2013 hit Gravity could be seen as an argument against putting women in the military or space, although I don’t think this was the director’s intention.)
Children of Men is set in 2027. For unknown reasons (surely none of them related to feminism), the human race has become infertile. The youngest humans on the planet are 18 years old.
In the Introduction to The White Nationalist Manifesto, I have a thought experiment about what would happen if a particular people, or the whole human race, were to discover that they have no genetic future, i.e., that they are going extinct. (I had not seen the movie at the time I wrote it, but I remember reading about James’ novel in 1992, and the premise stuck with me.)
James and I both speculated that impending human extinction would lead to rises in anti-social, short-term, self-destructive behaviors and well as intense religiosity. James also predicts the rise of Left-wing terrorist violence, which makes sense, since Leftism is a form of religion for unbelievers.
In James’ scenario, the nihilism and fanaticism unleashed by impending extinction have left the planet devastated by wars, insurrections, plagues, and migrations. But sea-girt Britain has managed to maintain order with an authoritarian government. Because Britain is relatively stable, however, it is a target for massive waves of illegal immigrants and refugees from the rest of the world.
In Cuarón’s film, entire cities have been walled off as refugee camps ruled by violent gangs. The Fishes are a Left-wing pro-refugee terrorist sect, who, in the name of love and kindness, want to unleash the refugee tide so it can drown Britain like the rest of Europe.
I am not sure if 2006 audiences and critics saw Cuarón’s dystopian vision of Britian’s future as outlandish and unlikely. But today his depictions of ruined English cities swarming with non-whites, parades of Muslims chanting “Allahu Akbar” and firing guns in the air, and brutal urban firefights between terrorist gangsters and the British army seem more like current events than prophecy — especially after the migrant crisis began in 2014, applauded by Europe’s elites as a humanitarian duty but also urged as an economic necessity — because of low European fertility. After all, Mammon is our god, and if Europeans fail to keep the economy afloat, they must be replaced by non-Europeans. The economic system is absolute. The people are fungible.
The story that James and Cuarón set in this world is, frankly, less interesting than the world itself. I won’t spoil the plot except to say that it centers around the first glimmer of hope for humanity in 18 years, namely a woman has become pregnant. But she is a refugee, and unfortunately, her life and that of her child are imperiled because they have become pawns of the Fishes terrorist gang, who want to use them as symbols to spark an uprising. The hero, Theo Farin (Sin City‘s Clive Owen), another pawn drawn in by the Fishes, tries to spirit the pregnant woman away to safety.
Cuarón portrays British police and soldiers as Nazi-like sadists and martinets who seem to delight in senseless acts of violence. But the Fishes are also portrayed as a pack of treacherous, hysterical, homicidal freaks and degenerates.
From a White Nationalist point of view, the most repugnant aspect of the film is that the pregnant woman is a very black African. This is Cuarón’s invention, not James’. Thus we are treated to the spectacle of a white hero risking life and limb to save a black woman and her child who are the hope of the human race. At the end of the film, we are left wondering: Does this child perhaps mean that the curse of infertility can be lifted for the entire human race? Or will Africans alone inherit the planet? Frankly, the latter is hardly a happy ending, and the whole film would end up being just a disgusting exercise in glorifying white racial altruism. Normies are supposed to feel hope at the end, but racially-conscious whites will still feel despair.
Nevertheless, happy ending or not, Children of Men is still worth seeing. It is an intense and gripping action film set in an increasingly realistic dystopian future. It is brilliantly directed with an excellent script, striking images, solid performances (including Michael Caine as a lovable old stoner), and some well-chosen music. Its images of a race facing long-term extinction and fighting off non-white hordes are especially relevant to whites today, thus Children of Men might be a useful teaching tool to get white “normies” to start talking about the most pressing issues of our time. After all, 2027 is right around the corner.
9 comments
Hello Trevor,
I always appreciate your reviews. Have not read this one yet, but will before the cold and rainy night here is out. Avoided the film because of clearly ideologically fueled departures from the novel. One friend thought badly of me for my reasons for refusal to see the film, hasn’t spoken to me since.
As for the novel, I wonder if Patricia James had read Greybeard, by Brian Aldiss, it has much the same scenario and much the same setting (around Oxford). If she had, I suppose she would ever admit to something as making her own take on someone so cheap as an SF novelist.
If you have not read Greybeard, I strongly recommend it for comparison. Also one of the many better works of Aldiss (most are great, short or long, but there a few clear failures).
Alright, I read the whole.
You can easily guess that my sticking point re. the film was, easily visible from the shorts, that the somewhat gimpy pregnant character in the novel by James was transformed into a black African.
As Wanda Jackson once said, Hot dog, that (well, he in the real lyric) made me mad!
Stating that as the reason for not wanting to view it was also why I was discarded by a former friend.
I may try to watch it in the future on your recommendation
The movie was very good, and, has perhaps THE BEST camerawork I’ve ever seen in a movie.
Like, you’ll have minute+ long scenes with 10,000 things going on in them all at once, wherein none of the actors make a mistake! It is a huge departure from the modern action movie wherein the average “shot” lasts like 5 seconds and everything feels like a really cheap horror movie.
Initially I thought the movie was total leftist propaganda— but, as the saying goes: “reality is right-wing”. So, even though the film TRIED to be pro-leftist, even the prejudices of the director weren’t enough to make the lefties (e.g., the Fishes) look like Le Good Guys.
I tried to watch it once; I lost interest when the pregnant black female appeared, and turned it off. I don’t plan on ever revisiting it.
Thanks for confirming that the pregnant woman in the film is Cuarón’s idea, and was not the case in James’ original novel. I had always wondered that, but never looked into it. This travesty completely changes the arc of the story and the symbolism of the pregnancy. James was an ardent Christian; I don’t know if she harbored a Pope Francis-styled Christianity (“3rd world refugees are our salvation!”) or an Anglophilic (and implicitly white) Christianity.
I’m also curious how other dominant features of the film are depicted in the novel. In the film, the Gestapo-like tactics of the “Homeland Security” police, and the latter’s callous disregard for and disrespect of the illegal immigrants they round up, is ham-fisted, moustache-twirling Hollywood villainy. Many of the illegal immigrants detained (held in small, crowded cages, like animals… get it?) more resemble emaciated, East European, Holocaust survivors than they do Muslim immigrants, an obvious attempt to draw some sort of misplaced historical analogy. (It appears the refugee & DHS themes were entirely Cuarón’s doing.)
As I recall, the radical, Antifa-like, terrorist group called ‘The Fishes’ are a militant group of Leftists claiming to be an ‘immigrants rights’ group. I read it as something of an insurgency-coalition formed between radical Muslims and the radical Leftists. Doing the illegal immigrants’ bidding, they are the source of much of the film’s bloodshed. Thoroughly paranoid in their conspiracy-theorizing, they blame coffee shop bombings not on Muslims (or Leftists) but on the government. (The sequence with the trigger-happy, dreadlocked wigger is particularly terrifying.)
From a purely technical point of view, Children of Men contains some brilliantly choreographed, single-shot sequences, the most famous being a six-minute-plus scene in which the protagonist Theo is first captured by The Fishes, narrowly escapes their clutches, only to flee to an even more dangerous situation involving government tanks and artillery. It is a most impressive sequence and had to have been a nail-biter for the Director and all involved.
I’ll never forget first seeing the movie’s extraordinary, penultimate scene, where we see a Hezbollah-like, ragtag (but uniformed) parade of Muslim insurgents marching through an embattled, mostly destroyed cityscape. Before we actually see them on screen, complete with green, Hezbollah-styled bandanas covering all but their eyes, we hear their uniform chants echo through the alleyways: “Alluha Akhbar!”
“James also predicts the rise of Left-wing terrorist violence, which makes sense, since Leftism is a form of religion for unbelievers.”
I’ve long been surprised we haven’t yet seen leftwing suicide bombers here in the West. (Paul Schrader’s recent film First Reformed, with its radical green agenda, entertains this as a rational course of selfless ‘activism’.) The requisite level of religious fervor on the Left certainly exists, as does other religious trappings. If one compares our current socio-political scene to that of the late-1960s/early-1970s, the rhetoric of hate and extremism by the Left then is certainly matched by today’s rhetoric, but there’s a notable deficit in the respective levels of political violence. In today’s scene, we’ve had nothing like the organized terrorist attempts of the Weather Underground and their ilk. (For comparison: in an 18-month period between 1971 & 1972, the FBI counted an estimated 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost 5 per day.) Similarly, while BLM has inspired some targeted killings, we are today experiencing nothing like the urban riots of the late 1960s (Watts; Newark; etc.)
Mitigating factors taking place today include the different and plentiful flavors of Soma we now have (internet-based entertainment; Netflix; cell phones), the more decentralized ways in which people ‘meet’ (online groups vs. organized physical meetings), and the embodied narcissism (‘the world revolves around me and my feelings’) intrinsic to leftist identity politics, one that perhaps eclipses necessary levels of self-sacrifice.
In time, though, as the religiosity of Political Correctness (with its dogma of anti-whiteness) intensifies, and the bleak nihilism and meaninglessness of hedonistic ‘expressive individualism’ becomes readily more apparent, extreme political violence will likely become manifest.
Testostsrone levels have decreased roughly 1% a year, every year, for at least the last 50yrs.
That would be a big reason for the drop in violent crime in America, as well as a decrease in political violence / terrorism.
The average Jewish communist circa “the good old days” was, comparatively, a raging bull alpha compared to the average Westerner in 2018
I viewed the film years ago. It is worth watching regardless of your political views. But Trevor, you bring up some interesting ideas in your review. Which leads me to ask this question of you and your fellow racial realists; If the White race were to go extinct, would you prefer that humanity in another form, be it Black, Asian, etc. continue on or would you prefer all of humanity to go extinct as well ?
I would hope that other forms of life would continue on the planet, human and non-human.
The movie is, of course, ambiguous on this point. But if the future of humanity is going to be African, then unlike the hero of the movie, I would not risk a single fingernail to ensure that fate.
Frankly, I would be more concerned about the survival of non-human wildlife.
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