Children of Men

Comparative · 2028 Leaving Cert

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) is a new prescribed film on the 2028 Comparative course. It is hard, bleak and brilliantly made, and almost nobody is writing about it for the exam yet. That is your advantage.

The world of the film is dying. No child has been born anywhere on earth for eighteen years, and as the story opens the youngest person alive, an eighteen-year-old, has just been killed. Britain has not collapsed so much as hardened into a police state, with refugees rounded up, caged in the streets and shipped to a coastal camp at Bexhill. Into this grey, exhausted society walks Theo, a former activist turned drinker, who is pulled back into politics by his ex-partner Julian and her group, the Fishes.

Theo is asked to escort a young refugee, Kee, across the country. In a barn he learns why she matters so much: Kee is pregnant, the first pregnancy the world has seen in a generation. From there the film becomes a chase, with Theo, Kee and the old hippie Jasper trying to reach a near-mythical rescue ship, the Tomorrow, while the Fishes, the army and the government all want the baby for their own ends.

Keep an eye on the key figures, because Cultural Context and Theme questions both reward you for knowing who drives the action. Theo is your reluctant centre, dragged from numbness back into caring. Kee carries the whole future of the species in a single pregnancy. Julian and the Fishes begin as idealists and curdle into something colder once power is within reach. Jasper, the old hippie hiding out in the woods, is the film’s last bit of warmth and humour. Hold those four or five in your head and you can speak about almost any part of the film with confidence.

For the Comparative, this film is strongest on Cultural Context, where its dystopian Britain gives you a whole world to read. It also works well for Theme or Issue (hope, despair, the value of a single life) and can support Literary Genre through Cuarón’s long unbroken takes and his choice of what the camera shows and withholds.

Study Children of Men

Start with the angle below. It takes the most distinctive thing about the film, its imagined society, and shows you how to turn that into Comparative points you can actually use under exam pressure.