According to audio and visual cues in the background, most notably found in the opening scene, the rest of the world has fallen victim to civil war and ecological and nuclear disaster.
Moreover, more than 18 years have passed since the last recorded birth. The plot centers around Theo Faron Clive Owen , an alcoholic activist-cum-bureaucrat. Mostly ignored upon its holiday release, the film has since found a second-life due to its topical storyline and being ranked amongst the greatest films of the 21st century by numerous critics. The driving force behind the plot of Children of Men is infertilityβno woman has given birth in nearly two decades and no one knows why. Infertility serves as an ambiguous villain that has robbed humanity of its children, in turn draining all hope and rationality from society.
The world has come to a standstill as it awaits death. For Hegel, history would end when freedom was attained in the modern nation-state. This ultimate actualization of freedom would mark the logical end of the dialectic, which marches forth through time under the guise of theses, antitheses, and synthesesβcontradictions confronting and ultimately synthesizing with opposites that in turn confront new contradictions and so on and so forth. However, due to infertility, the dialectic in Children of Men has reached an insurmountable impasse.
In Children of Men , humanity is robbed of reproduction, its greatest biological gift. In our world, rampant reproduction, of both ourselves and modern industries, has severely strained our relationship to the planet. This notion of overdevelopment is echoed by philosopher John Gray in The Possibility of Hope , a short documentary that serves as an addendum to the film.
Thus far, bureaucrats have proven sterile in their efforts to confront this crisis rooted within the spirit of capitalism and the disasters accompanying it. While the notion of biological infertility is one of fantasy, ideological infertility has undergirded much of the 21st century.
