Children of Men

While the movie, Children of Men was quite honestly extremely disgusting (showing a woman give birth in the back of a shack, which was inexplicably repulsive) at times, it did portray an interesting take on what will be the fall, or shall I say the alpacalypse, of the modern world. The movie never explicitly names what caused the entire population to die off and start a modern warfare between literally every single person on the planet earth and infertility.

In my opinion, the most shocking, and sadly fairly realistic, event that occurred in this movie was the concentration camps for the "fugees", aka illegal immigrants whose homes were destroyed. In the world we live in today, we tend to be afraid of what we don't know, which in the case of this movie, were the people from other towns. Instead of allowing the immigrants to move into England and attempt to live a normal life, they hunted them down and made it nearly impossible to enter the country unless taken into one of their camps. Instead of putting the prisoners into a jail that we today put criminals in, the government had decided to put the illegal immigrants into camps where they were usually either killed, tortured, or both. One of the reasons that I am assuming they did this is because in a prison system like we have in America, the prisoners are clothed and fed because majority of the time the imprisoned have a release date to be sent back into society. In the movie, however, the government killed or was the cause of the prisoners' deaths because then there would be no risk of them entering the country.

It seemed to me, throughout watching the film, that the government didn't even want to help the current citizens of England alive. On multiple occasions in the film there would be propaganda of some sort for a pill that would kill whoever had taken that pill in their sleep. This form of assisted suicide was endorsed by the government so they wouldn't have to assist anyone in their country besides themselves. While I was watching the film, I wondered if the cause for the infertility and the warfare and destruction of all of the nations was caused by either multiple governments or the government of England itself. To me it seemed strange that if the disaster had been environmental or natural, there would only be one country left standing on the entire planet. Also, the midwife in the film said that the infertility started out through women having miscarriages all of the time, and eventually resulted to infertility. It seems strange that there would be this type of situation that would just occur on its own, and not planned by anyone.

All in all, this movie definitely made me think, and I would recommend it to anyone who not only enjoys literature and films that are dystopian, but anyone who enjoys films in general.