When, towards the end of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, the sight of a crying baby suddenly tempts a serpent-line of raging soldiers into dim reverence, you recall Julian’s (Julianne Moore) line to Theo (Clive Owen) earlier in the film, spoken shortly after the coffee shop he’s just left keels under bomb blast: “You hear that ringing in your ears? That ‘eeeee’? That’s your ear cells dying. You’ll never be able to hear that frequency again. Enjoy it while you can.” For over 18 years – in a world shot through with stark remiss –, the baby’s wail has also been a ‘lost’ frequency, thanks to a global infertility epidemic. Yet, for all the thrill of no more morning-after hang-ups, the existential overhang proves to be too much: With the pyrex of civilisation finally breaking, London (the futureworld capital) is impelled into a grim boil of neofascist command.

For the most part, in relaying the prospect of a future-with-no-future, Cuarón’s MO remains requisite biotrash: The rich seek refuge in glass towers (barricaded by wall-length Picassos), while down below the streets descend into fiery chaos. In the meantime, no direct cause is attributed the plague, so that, as the product of scriptural summary, it caps humanity’s survival at the lifetimes that now remain on earth. As a result, people’s economic circumstances are flattened out and then reified; which otherwise goes to say that luxury becomes a sleight of vision - the sober unwillingness to look past death’s horizon. Beyond this bird’s-eye view of global conditions though, the film lack’s any genuine political intuition; instead, it seems happy to pose human distress as another excuse for messianic rebirth. Thus, when the kid (who undertakes various symbolic incarnations, from Foley to Bazooka to Dylan) finally issues her distressed birdsong, she’s momentarily laying all of humanity’s sins awash. That she should be born black, in a city that systematically herds its immigrants out to ghettos, is enough to ignite a beeline for fabled hippie outreach, The Human Project, with Theo cast as inadvertent escort. On the way, Cuarón wastes no time turning the environment into a seamless warzone, as unblinking tracking shots lock onto different paths-of-action like thought-changes. Which makes for a totally arresting experience on a moment-by-moment basis; but as food-for-thought, there’s little more here than a doomsday pamphlet.—David Levinson