Catholic Movies Online

directed by Alphonse Cuaron 
reviewed by Debra Murphy
(content warnings: Rated R for violence, profanity) 

This is an amazing film, both cinematically and thematically. But it’s the theme I want to touch on quickly, because I almost can’t believe it.

A number of critics have mentioned the film’s "dystopian vision", but I have yet to see anyone connect director Alphonse Cuaron’s vision with what appear’s to this viewer as a seering critique of the Culture of Death, especially if we don’t get our act together as a society and start appreciating the dignity and miracle which is human life.

For reasons unknown (though "Act of God" seems as reasonable explanation as any offered), the near-future depicted in this film is a world in which women have suddenly, almost overnight, become infertile. The youngest person on earth, an eighteen-year-old whose status as the last child born has made him a celebrity, has just been murdered in a street brawl and the whole world is in mourning.

Worse, the consequences to the world of eighteen years without a single child being born anywhere has brought about complete stagnation and decline at best, and at worst, wholesale chaos and despair. To say that Cuaron’s vision of a world without children is bleak is a shocking understatement; indeed, he is doing nothing less than than highlighting the miracle which is human life by a chiaroscuro backgrounding of the despair which would await us all if that mysterious gift were suddenly taken away. As the old song says, "you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone."

It is almost impossible to watch this film without thinking repeatedly of the appalling waste and crime against nature which is abortion and euthanasia, and I have a hard time imagining that the implications weren’t clear to the filmmakers. But maybe I’m naive. 

Still, just when I was beginning to suspect that I must be reading more into the film than the filmmakers intended, I noticed the two "mantras" frequently repeated in the televised background of this future Dystopic England, broadcast on every streetcorner by a government sinking into fascism because it cannot deal with the challenges of an aging society and mobs of desperate immigrants pouring into Britain to escape the even worse poverty and chaos in the rest of the world. One mantra is an appeal (laced with a threat) for the people of Britain to turn in illegal aliens–aliens which are to be herded into ghettos and camps that resemble nothing so much as Nazi lagers. The second mantra, which I found particularly shocking, given its very un-PC usage of  pro-Choice code words, was the govermental encouragement (one presumes especially in the cases of the disabled and elderly) of the use of "Quietus", a euphemistically named drug to be used for killing oneself. The drug’s mantra: "It’s your life. It’s your choice." If I were a member of NARAL or Planned Parenthood, I wouldn’t be very happy right about now, expecially since the film, though hardly a blockbuster, is getting deservedly rave reviews.

One thing for sure, I cannot for the life of me imagine this film being made even five years ago.

Oh, and a note on the film’s origin: The movie was based on a novel by P.D. James, which as many of you know is my absolute favorite mystery author, creator of the Adam Dalgleish mystery series. I read the book when it first came out in the early nineties–I believe it’s the only novel of James’ that is not a mystery–and while I liked it very much, and thought James was pulling off a modest little pro-life thematic coup with its publication, I think the film is even better.  

Bottom line: two movies of the calibre and thematic impact of Apocalypto and Children of Men coming out in the space of a month tells me that the hammerlock that the pro-Choice crowd has had on Hollywood is at an end.

Watch a trailer of the movie here.
Read John Murphy’s Godspy review of the film.