Children of Men

Comparative · 2028 Leaving Cert

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men imagines a world where no child has been born for eighteen years, and then films it as though a news crew had been dropped into the middle of it.

The film came out in 2006, loosely based on P. D. James’s novel, and moves the story to a Britain that has held together while the rest of the world has not. The government’s line is that Britain soldiers on. What that means in practice is refugees in cages at bus stops, checkpoints on the motorway, and a state-issued suicide kit advertised on television.

It is on the comparative list for 2028 and is usually taken for Cultural Context. Be careful to write about the film and not the novel, because they differ substantially in plot and ending.

Children of Men: The Story in Five Beats

One. London, 2027. Theo Faron, a former activist now working in a government department and drinking his way through the day, buys a coffee while a news bulletin reports the death of the youngest person alive. He steps outside and the shop explodes behind him.

Two. Theo is taken by the Fishes, a militant group campaigning for immigrant rights, and finds their leader is his ex-wife Julian. Their son died in a flu pandemic years earlier. Julian asks him to obtain transit papers for a young refugee woman.

Three. On a country road the car is ambushed and Julian is shot. The sequence is filmed in one continuous take inside the moving vehicle, and it turns a scene that would normally be exciting into something closer to witnessing an accident. In the aftermath Theo learns that Kee is pregnant, the first pregnancy in eighteen years.

Four. The Fishes intend to use the child as a political symbol, so Theo runs with Kee and the midwife Miriam. They shelter with Jasper, an old friend growing cannabis in the woods, who buys them time at the cost of his own life. Their route out runs through Bexhill, a fenced refugee camp on the coast.

Five. Kee gives birth in the camp as an uprising begins. Theo carries her and the baby out through a running battle, is shot, and gets them to a rowing boat in the fog to wait for a ship called the Tomorrow. Whether it arrives is left to the closing sound.

A World Built From Real Headlines

The most examinable thing about this film is how little of it is invented. Cuarón fills the background with images taken almost directly from news photography of the previous decade: figures in orange jumpsuits and hoods, dogs at checkpoints, people held in cages beside a railway line. The dialogue never explains any of it, and it does not need to.

This is exactly what a Cultural Context answer wants. You are not asked what the characters believe about their society, you are asked how the society is organised, and this film puts the organisation in the corner of every frame: who is detained, who is armed, who is allowed on a bus, who is behind wire.

Hope With No Argument Behind It

Nobody in the film has a theory about why the infertility happened, and nobody finds a cure. What the story offers instead is a single pregnancy carried through a war zone by two people who have no plan beyond the next hour.

The scene everyone remembers is the stairwell in Bexhill. Theo and Kee come down through a building under fire, the baby starts crying, and the fighting stops. Soldiers lower their weapons, a woman reaches out to touch the child, someone crosses themselves. It lasts less than a minute before the shooting resumes, which is the honest version of the idea: the sound of a baby can stop a war for about forty seconds.

Long Takes That Refuse to Cut Away

Three sequences are shot in single unbroken takes and they are the reason the film is set for study. The ambush on the country road, where the camera pivots inside the car and the violence arrives from every window at once. The escape through the forest and the death of Jasper. And the Bexhill battle, running several minutes with the camera at shoulder height, mud and rubble in the frame, and at one point blood spattering the lens and staying there.

Cuarón’s refusal to cut has a moral effect as well as a technical one. Editing usually protects us. Here we are given no relief and no privileged position, and we experience the events at the same rate the characters do.

Who’s Who

Theo Faron begins as a man who has stopped caring about anything and never quite becomes a hero. He is frightened, unarmed and mostly reacting, which is what makes his ending land.

Kee is a young refugee, pregnant, and treated by almost everyone as a symbol rather than a person. Her insistence on her own decisions is the film’s quiet argument.

Julian is the activist who still believes in organised action, and the film removes her early and shockingly.

Jasper is the one warm presence, a retired political cartoonist caring for his catatonic wife, and his death is filmed without heroics.

Luke takes over the Fishes and shows how quickly a liberation movement can start behaving like the state it opposes.

How This Film Is Examined

Cultural Context is the usual mode, and the ground is rich: the treatment of immigrants, the power of the state, the collapse of religion into cults and superstition, class differences visible in the contrast between the refugee camp and Theo’s cousin’s private gallery full of rescued art. For Theme or Issue, hope, despair and the value placed on a single life all work.

For any mode, keep returning to what is on screen. In film answers, the marks are in the description of shots, and this is a film that hands you those descriptions.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Work from three sequences: the coffee shop bombing that opens the film, the car ambush, and the stairwell in Bexhill. Describe each one in your own words, including camera movement and what is visible at the edges of the frame, and keep dialogue out of it. That is not a limitation, it is how this film communicates. Then link straight across to your other texts on how a society treats the people it has decided do not belong.

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