qz thoughtsChildren of Men
This movie by Alfonso Cuarón came out in 2006 and is set in 2027. When it was new, someone I know commented that the lack of electric cars was hard to believe. Sitting in early 2021, having just watched Children of Men, the lack of electric cars seems quite plausible.
The basic story is for some reason, unknown to the characters, women, at least humans, stopped having babies in 2006. The story opens with the death-of-Princess-Diana level news about the youngest person, an 18 year old, having been killed. The coverage gives his age to the day. I get the sense that after the infertility set in, people just gave up on preserving the world for the future and doubled down on pollution.
It's clear that what's left of society has given up most hope, Britain is shown as a rare place where life sort-of continues normally, and thus is a huge destination for displaced peoples from the rest of Europe. It is a point of great friction in that world.
Background details show quite believable tech advances like the fancy monitors in an office, a TV as an alarm clock, and video ads on the sides of buses. And seeing the refugees get left in cages and having a reference to a flu pandemic made this seem rather 2020-topical.
Anyway, the main character, Theo, is a former activist now numb to pretty much everything. "At least with a hangover, I feel something." Then his ex-wife approaches him to ask for a favor. There's a young woman who needs to get to safety — she's pregnant and everyone wants to have the baby for propaganda reasons.
This story doesn't break ground with themes. To me, it seems like a tale ripped from 1970s dystopia, with the 1970s taste for setting it twenty to thirty years later, but with much more modern budget and production values.
The whisk-a-woman-to-safety (with some precious cargo) story has been done before. My mind went to The Ultimate Warrior (1975, Yul Brenner as title character) there. The prison camp scenes made me think of Escape from New York (1981, late for 1970s).
The details, filming, world realization, war scenes, etc, all those are much, much better than the 1970s versions of this story. As such, it's good entry into that escape collapsed society niche, just time shifted.
Five security checkpoints out of six.