Children of Men – Bitch Flicks

Six Types of Political Movies (Spoiler: This Genre Includes Literally All Movies)

All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in internet troll school.

Written by Katherine Murray.

All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in Internet troll school. In a turn of events that is both terrifying and depressing, a feminist game critic was recently driven from her home by threats of violence after some men didn’t like a video she made. If you’ve been following the story, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is the notion that this critic was somehow imposing a political viewpoint on a space that was neutral before she arrived. She was, as the troll legends tell it, “ruining” something that was “pure entertainment” by “trying to make it political.”

Film has been treated as an art form, and been subject to the same critical analysis as art, for long enough now that it doesn’t gall people to see a review that focuses on more than the technical mechanics of how the thing was made. Even so, if you’re a critic who’s interested in gender, race, or sexuality, you still get blasted from time to time for “making things political” when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

With that in mind, may I present:

6 Types of Political Movies

1. The Message Movie

The Message Movie explicitly takes a position on some political topic. Brave is about how women have the right to choose their own destinies. Born on the Fourth of July is an indictment of the Vietnam War. Quills at least thinks it’s about how freedom of expression is the most important good.

Message Movies don’t have to be blunt and simple – and I would argue that Brave and Born on the Fourth of July are fairly nuanced in their presentation – but the blunt, simple movies are the ones that are easiest to point to.

For example, Water, directed by Deepa Mehta, is a really nice-looking two hour lecture on how the Laws of Manu have led to women’s oppression in India. The two main story lines – about a young woman who’s forced into prostitution and then shamed into killing herself, and a child bride who becomes impoverished after the husband she’s only met once leaves her a widow – are shaped explicitly to drive this point home, and the movie ends with a third woman chasing after Gandhi’s train, begging him to help the untouchables.

Whether or not you agree with the film’s position on the issue – and I certainly don’t know enough about it to offer an opinion – Water is very straight-forward in its message and intent. It would be hard to walk away from it thinking that it wasn’t political, even if you didn’t know that Mehta’s films have sparked violent protest in India.

The Message Movie is the easiest kind of movie to discuss from a political point of view, because it frames the questions for you and draws attention to the issues it wants to debate.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 1 percent – even if we don’t all agree with or about the film’s message, we all understand that it’s trying to tell us something. Most people think it’s fair play to discuss that.

2. The Implied Message Movie

The Implied Message Movie still offers a strong point of view on political issues, and still seems to be doing it deliberately – it’s just not as explicit as the Message Movie.

One of my favorite films ever, Children of Men, mashes together everything wrong in the world, from terrorism to racism to wrongful imprisonment to war, but never didactically spells out its message for viewers. At the same time, no one would leave the theater believing that director Alfonso Cuarón is agnostic about immigration policy or the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. The movie is full of disquieting, uncomfortable scenes and topical imagery that make the director’s position on real-life issues quite clear.

It’s the same way that no one would watch Brazil and walk away thinking, “I’m optimistic about the moral path our bureaucratic culture will be walking,” or feel like racial tension is not a pressing issue, based on watching Crash.

The Implied Message Movie has clearly dipped its oar in the river of politics, and has ideas it wants to share with us, even if they aren’t packaged and delivered quite as neatly as the message in the Message Movie.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how abstract the movie’s themes are, there’s a chance someone will tell you that you’re ruining it by making it about real life.

3. The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie

The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie also has its oar in the river of politics, but it resists pushing off in any particular direction. Biographical movies, or movies based on a true story, are especially likely to land in this category, since the filmmakers may feel that they shouldn’t “impose” a viewpoint on events.

Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, was controversial, in part, because it didn’t come right out and say that torture was wrong. The scenes depicting torture are filmed in a cold, emotionally detached way, often taking us outside the point of view of either the victims or the perpetrators. Rather than discussing whether what happened was right or wrong, Zero Dark Thirty seems more interested in exploring the motivations behind it, from a fairly non-judgmental standpoint.

Michael Moore has a pretty persuasive argument for why the film is actually an indictment of torture as an interrogation technique, but your opinion on the events of the film will mostly depend on your opinion of torture in real life.

12 Years a Slave, though it’s not likely to be mistaken for a pro-slavery movie, is also far more interested in exploring the social and psychological dynamics of slavery than in arguing for why it’s wrong. As compassionate human beings, of course we understand that what we’re seeing is wrong, but the movie is leaving us to do the ideological work on our own.

Whereas Zero Dark Thirty and 12 Years a Slave use politically charged issues as their primary content, straight-up biographical movies like Walk the Line and The Runaways – especially when the subjects or direct descendants of the subjects are alive – often try to take a non-judgmental attitude toward the characters, simply reporting what they did, without examining the larger context.

In either case, the “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie leaves you on your own to decide how you feel about what happened and your feelings are probably based on information drawn from outside the film.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how central the issue you want to discuss is to the movie’s themes, you may be accused of reading something into it that isn’t there.

4. The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie

The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie tells a benign, feel-good story that reaffirms what its target audience already believes, while steadfastly ignoring anything else that might crop up.

The Help exists to congratulate me, as a white person, for being less racist than the movie’s most villainous character. It invites the audience to identify with white people who Aren’t Racist, and completely limits the scope of its discussion to the Jim Crow era, avoiding any opportunity to draw a parallel or connection between racism as it existed in the 1960s and racism as it exists today.

Similarly, Forrest Gump takes a long tour through twentieth-century American history, reassuring us at every turn, through the simple, home-spun wisdom of its hero, that life is miraculous, love is important, and we should always have faith and feel hope. As Amy Nicholson recently pointed out in LA Weekly, the movie avoids discussing any of the difficult, contentious issues Forrest encounters, from the Vietnam War, to the AIDS crisis, to women’s rights, to civil rights – struggles that defined the national history it’s asking us to feel good about.

The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie doesn’t just leave us to make up our own minds – it actively steers us away from controversial topics by drawing our attention to the topics we’re most likely to agree about.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – this is the tipping point where we start to talk about and criticize what’s not in the movie, and people don’t like that as much.

5. The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie

The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie is aware that it should probably say something about the issues that it’s raised, but it would rather just do that quickly so it can move on.

Sex and the City 2, for example, makes the bizarre, kind-of-orientalist decision to send its characters to Abu Dhabi for most of the film. Once there, they are, of course, confronted with the very complicated and difficult issue of women’s rights within the UAE, which they address by:

Treating it like it’s none of their business, so they can have fun riding camels
Trying to make a culturally sensitive statement about how it’s probably OK to wear a veil
Deciding that the women of Abu Dhabi probably have things under control, since they meet to wear make-up in secret
Behaving in culturally inappropriate ways and then acting surprised when people get angry about it
Spilling a bunch of condoms all over the street and then screaming at people

Sex and the City 2 is in no way equipped to discuss a topic as complex and politically volatile as women’s rights in the UAE, and it doesn’t really want to do that, either. Instead, it awkwardly fluctuates through a series of attitudes wishing, like so many wayward travelers, that someone else’s political conflict didn’t have to ruin its vacation.

Similarly, 22 Jump Street, which I wrote about earlier, is aware that it should say something about gender and sexuality, given that so many of its jokes are essentially gay jokes, underneath. The best it can manage is an inconsistent pastiche of ideas, in which its characters sometimes deliver humorously-timed lectures on tolerance and equality.

The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie acknowledges that there’s something we might want to discuss about its content, but quietly begs us to just let it go.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – depending on how graciously the film has requested that you not do this, and how entertaining it otherwise is, you might get told you’re a buzz-kill.

6. The Invisible Perspective Movie

The Invisible Perspective Movie realistically presents ideas and attitudes that are so normalized within our culture that we’ve forgotten that they form one particular perspective, rather than an objective view of reality.

In The Way Way Back, the film’s teenage protagonist forms an emotional bond with a surrogate father figure who helps him come of age as a man. The film, which is otherwise very thoughtful and enjoyable to watch, takes for granted that part of becoming a man involves learning to objectify women, and battling with other men to win a woman’s loyalty.

Someone watching the movie might say, “Well, that’s what boys learn to do,” and I’m sure that, for some boys, it is. But the fact that the movie doesn’t label or examine this as a political issue – the fact that it treats this as a completely unremarkable feature of gender – doesn’t mean the issue’s not there.

Edge of Tomorrow casually presents a female soldier as being competent and skilled – something that many critics did comment on, since it’s not what we usually see – and it also casually presents the fact that the male soldiers she serves with don’t like her and call her “Full-Metal Bitch” behind her back. Both of those things – the idea that a woman can be a competent soldier and the idea that that means nobody will like her – have political meanings, though you might notice only the first one – or neither – on the first pass.

Every movie that exists is made from a certain perspective, whether the movie calls attention to that perspective or not. And, since we live in a world full of constant political struggle, the perspective a movie is made with can necessarily be read as offering a political viewpoint.

That doesn’t make the movie good or bad – The Way Way Back doesn’t “lose” at politics because it didn’t spend a lot of time interrogating its perspective on gender – it just means that we frame our discussions about it differently. A movie that isn’t specifically trying to impart a political message is still a mirror to the culture that produced it and, by examining what we see in the mirror, we can learn new things about ourselves.

Critics add the most value when they talk about things that aren’t obvious, and help us to consider our assumptions from an alternate perspective. They do, indeed, “go looking for things” to talk about rather than taking films at face value, because that’s how you engage with art as something that’s culturally relevant.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 99 percent – people hate it when things are culturally relevant.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

The Exploitation of Women in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Children of Men’

Movie poster for Children of Men

Written by Amanda Rodriguez for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

I like Alfonso Cuarón’s bleak, dystopian cinematic interpretation of Children of Men (based on the PD James novel) wherein the world collapses after an infertility pandemic strikes, causing there to be no human births for over 18 years. It poses remarkable questions like, “What do we value about life?” and “What do children mean to humanity’s sense of longevity and continuity?” and “Does the future exist if humans won’t be around for it?” Though this film appeals to my sci-fi post-apocalyptic proclivities, its treatment of women, children, and reproduction leaves much to be desired.

Children of Men immediately draws critical attention to this futuristic declining world’s tendency to turn women and children into symbols. The opening scene shows droves of people mourning the death of the youngest person in much the same way that celebrity deaths are mourned, setting up the 18-year-old man as a symbol of youth and a reminder of humanity’s impending extinction. The activist immigrant rights group, the Fishes, sees young pregnant Kee (portrayed by Clare-Hope Ashitey) as a symbol. She is not only a West African immigrant, but also the only woman to become pregnant in 18 years. She is a symbol of the humanity of immigrants, the salvation of the human race itself, and of a coming revolution. It is also made clear that women are forced to submit to fertility tests or face imprisonment, rendering these survivors little more than failed symbols of reproduction and shamed symbols of infertility. Though the film overtly critiques this desire to turn human beings into symbols, it indulges in it quite a bit.

The scene in the abandoned school is pregnant (pun intended) with symbolism.

“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.” – Miriam

As the young Kee sits alone on a rickety swing set, the camera pans the dilapidated building and Miriam recounts her experiences as a medical midwife at the beginning of the pandemic. The scene mourns imaginary children who never existed along with an imaginary future that proves likewise illusory. The empty school reinforces the crushing absence of children, which in turn represents the absence of a future.

The film apparently resists turning pregnant Kee into a symbol by showing that the only sane response to her pregnancy is that of Theo’s overwhelming desire to get her to a doctor so that she can receive necessary medical attention. However, when Kee reveals the fullness of her pregnant stomach to Theo, it is nothing but indulgent symbolism. She takes her shirt off in the middle of a barn full of cows, her posture of one hand covering her breasts and the other cupping her belly simultaneously one of modesty and fecundity.

Kee is dehumanized and symbolized

This image of the pregnant black woman amongst livestock paired with the swelling music that evokes apotheosis is particularly offensive to me. Her humanity is transcended into grotesque female-coded symbols like earth, goddess, fertility, and nature. Her blackness is racistly used to reinforce the nature symbolism as well as the birth and beginning of mankind. The deliberateness of these symbols is even more apparent when the original PD James text The Children of Men is considered in which Julian (played by middle-aged white Julianne Moore) was the character with the mystical pregnancy. Though it is impossible to not read some symbolism into Kee’s pregnancy, her “revelation” scene is exploitative and is done dramatically and specifically to benefit the male viewer in the form of Theo.

Which leads us to the next issue I had with Children of Men: Most of the female characters are peripheral or marginalized. The midwife Miriam is portrayed as a religious nutcase who does some kind of spiritual Tai Chi, chants over Kee’s pregnant belly instead of using the hard science she learned in medical school, and believes in UFOs. Janice, the wife of Jasper (played by Michael Caine) is catatonic. Marichka is a Romanian woman who doesn’t speak English, babbles a lot, and has a bizarre relationship with her dog.

The unsavory Marichka driving Theo & Kee to a filthy room for the night

Julian, though a strong woman, is too often shown from Theo’s perspective as the beautiful, unattainable bitter ex-wife and forever mourning ex-mother. Not only that, but she dies suddenly very early on in the film. Her death itself is the most important thing about her because it’s an inside job, showing that the so-called immigrant rights activist group has questionable morality and can be trusted no more than the oppressive government regime. Therefore, Julian’s death is highly symbolic and paradigm shifting.

The Fishes scorn Julian’s non-violent methodology and murder her in order to exploit Kee’s baby as a symbol for revolution.

Not only were there few representations of non-symbolic women, but the entire film, a film about fertility, motherhood, and childbirth, is told from the perspective of a man. The most flagrant example of a marginalized female character is Kee. She is a child herself with no true agency, who knows nothing of pregnancy and motherhood, who must rely on the experience and protection of Theo. Kee’s lack of agency and complete reliance on Theo set up yet another patriarchal iteration of genesis wherein the rebirth of the human race isn’t due to Kee and her baby girl, Dylan; it’s due to the perseverance of a lone man whose ideals may be jaded, but he feels compelled to “do the right thing” no matter what noble sacrifices it might require.

Theo sacrifices his own life to protect Kee and her baby, ensuring they make it to safety first

Not only is Theo the martyr and savior of this film, but he knows more about motherhood than Kee does. He delivers the baby, coaching Kee on how to breathe and push, motivating her when she is overcome. He then delivers Kee and her baby to the so-called safety of The Human Project (a secretive group purporting to be searching for an infertility cure).

I ask you, why is this story told from Theo’s perspective? Why isn’t Kee our heroine? She’s the one with messianic qualities and an epic quest who undergoes a mystical pregnancy, sneaks her way out of West Africa only to become a hunted “fugee” in Britain, before traversing war-torn areas only to give birth in a filthy flophouse before escaping via rowboat to the elusive, mythical Human Project. Why is her tale told once removed in the form of Theo? Her femaleness along with her Otherness as a black woman and her status (in our current day culture) as a pregnant woman apparently give Cuarón license to strip her of real humanity and complexity. Her lack of agency in her own story and the way that she’s relegated to supporting-character land make it easy to inscribe meaning upon her, to turn her into a symbol in a way that Theo and his friend Jasper aren’t really because they’re men…children of men.

Kee’s pregnant body is turned into an icon.

In the novel version, it is the male sperm that becomes nonviable, causing the infertility pandemic. In the movie version, it’s the women who are suddenly infertile after repeated miscarriages. This puts the blame on women for the pandemic while identifying men (i.e. Theo) as the solution to the problem. It even makes me wonder if the way that the film depicts infertility as full of despair (as if civilization must collapse if we can’t make babies) is some sort of derailment of a masculine ideal, wherein reproduction and the passing on of one’s genes is a vital component of manhood. Yes, it would suck if humanity’s extinction was imminent, but the implosion of cultures and societies does not necessarily logically follow. Even now, we destroy our environment and use up our resources at an unsustainable rate, and first world countries do not fail because of it. The slow march toward extinction is one we’re increasingly familiar with as war over oil spreads across the globe and our climate Hades-heats up.

Children of Men‘s depiction of women as props, tools, symbols, or cardboard underscores the notion that women’s true purpose is reproduction, and when women can’t reproduce, they’re not only useless, but society itself collapses under the burden of their neglect of duty. Despite many of the intriguing themes this film explores (including a scathing denouncement of the treatment of immigrants), Children of Men ends up falling in line with its mainstream contemporaries to assert that women are merely bodies, that a woman’s value lies in her ability to reproduce, and that she has and should have no control over that body or that ability to reproduce.

The “Plague” of Infertility in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Children of Men’

Dire times in Children of Men as “The World Has Collapsed”

Guest post written by Carleen Tibbetts for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

Women can’t get pregnant anymore and nobody knows why. This the central lamentation in Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 dystopian film Children of Men, based on P.D. James’s novel. Set in England in the year 2027, this is the story of the human race entering its final phase. Cuaron brings us into Orwellian territory in which nations worldwide have fallen as a result of war, disease, and famine. Britain remains a sort of lucrative last bastion in these end times and people across the globe are scrambling to get in. Foreign immigrants are referred to as “fugees,” and, borrowing from Hitler’s playbook, the British government rounds them up, cages them, and sends them to zoned and policed ghettos and camps. To hire, sell to, or even feed fugees is a crime. Avoiding fertility tests when the human race is dying out is also a crime. There are no more sounds of children laughing. There are sirens. There are bombs. There is gunfire. There are government-provided suicide kits. There is the wailing and gnashing of teeth, especially since an eighteen year old, the youngest human on the planet, has just died.

The film opens with the main character, Theo (Clive Owen), getting coffee at a local café. Café patrons look on inconsolably as the news program on the café’s TV breaks the story that “Baby Diego,” the world’s youngest person, was shot because he refused to sign an autograph. The title of “world’s youngest person” now passes to a woman older than Diego by a matter of months. Theo exits the coffee shop and within seconds, it blows up. He makes his way to his government job though, ears ringing, completely accustomed to daily violence at this level.

All the workers in Theo’s office are glued to their computer screens, weeping as Diego “in memoriam” slideshows are played. Theo plays the grief card to skip out on work and visit his longtime liberal activist friend, Jasper (Michael Caine), and his wife, who MI-5 tortured into a state of catatonia for her radical photojournalism. It is here we learn that Theo is a former radical who was married to another radical, Julian (Julianne Moore), yet the death of their young son years ago wedged them apart.

Theo, his former spouse, Julian, and their son.

Jasper begins telling Theo about “The Human Project,” a seemingly mythic organization aimed at getting to the root problem of the infertility pandemic. Theo remains apathetic and unmoved by Jasper’s enthusiasm for this cause. He’s unconvinced they exist and claims that even if they do find a cure for infertility, it’s too late, because the world “went to shit” already. There is always blame associated with infertility, and it’s usually placed on the woman, as if somehow she is not doing her part, as if her “defunct” biology renders her useless, as if her sole purpose is procreation. These future scientists don’t know if it’s due to pollution, radiation, pesticides, global warming, or even low-sperm count (lest we forget that men are not always completely virile), and the fanatical religious right element views the infertility pandemic as a righteous punishment handed down from God. For them, it’s just another pit stop on the road to Armageddon.

Julian has her activists kidnap Theo and she persuades him to use his governmental connections to sneak a fugee past checkpoints and out of the country. It’s obvious that he’s still in love with her, and although she’s keeping him in the dark as to her motives, he agrees to do it. Theo asks Julian how she got over their son’s death so quickly, to which she abruptly and angrily replies, “You don’t have a monopoly on grief,” and that Dylan’s death is something that haunts her on a daily basis. They meet up with fellow activists, including former gynecologic nurse, Miriam (Pam Ferris) to transport Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) past British borders and into the hands of The Human Project. En route to a supposedly safe location, they are accosted, and Julian is killed. Miriam, Theo, and Kee stay the night in a remote English farmhouse with the other activists who have rallied to ensure Kee’s safe departure.

Theo has absolutely no idea what’s going on. He doesn’t completely trust these people and wonders why everyone is risking their lives for this young woman. Sensing Theo needs convincing, Kee disrobes and we see that she is extremely pregnant. Now Theo has a purpose. Something to live for. Now the entire human race has something to live for. Once skeptical about The Human Project, he realizes what’s at stake, playing a sort of Joseph figure to Kee’s Mary. Although this isn’t his baby, it’s sort of everyone’s baby. Kee admits she doesn’t know who got her pregnant, but she’s definitely portrayed in a pure sort of light. The scene where she reveals her pregnancy to Theo takes place in a barn surrounded by hay and cows—heavy with Biblical overtones.

Kee reveals her pregnancy

Kee wants to have the baby at the farm, but Theo overhears the radicals plotting to execute him as soon as he gets Kee past the checkpoints, and he realizes they want to use her baby as a political bargaining chip to advocate for illegal immigrants’ rights. Theo, Miriam, and Kee escape to Jasper’s, where he tells them his old friend in the army can get them into a refugee camp. Once inside, they can get a boat out to sea where The Human Project ship, The Tomorrow, will take Kee to safety.

Kee had never seen a pregnant woman, had no idea what was happening to her, and felt “like a freak” when she saw her body change. When she felt the baby kick, she knew it was alive, and that she was, too. Jasper tells Kee about Dylan’s death, and that Theo’s fate lost out to chance. But isn’t this what conception is all about? Chance? Isn’t life itself a game of chance? Is parenthood an obligation? A choice? Is a child a blessing or a burden? With all the atrocities we’ve carried out and all the violence we’ve enacted on one another, do we deserve to exist? Do we need to bring new life into this mess? And suppose Kee had not wanted this baby?

Other than being presented with where she would like to have her baby, nobody asks Kee if she wanted any of this to begin with. Perhaps the fate of the human race resting on Kee’s shoulders, or, more appropriately, in her uterus, and perhaps the key to fertility being something unique to her genetic makeup is motivation enough for her to unquestioningly continue her pregnancy. Jasper’s fate vs. chance statement brings up a great deal of unanswered existential questions, not only as they pertain to the film’s characters, but for us living in a world where, for example, China has a one-child-per family limit, or where a friend jokingly told me that I’d get a better income tax refund if I got knocked up.

Theo, Kee, and Miriam escape Jasper’s just as the authorities arrive and kill him. The three of them plan to rendezvous with Jasper’s military connection at one of many now-defunct elementary schools —how bizarrely apropos! A In a haunting scene, Theo walks the school’s hallways and a lone deer runs down a corridor. Earlier in the movie, there were dogs all over the farmhouse property. Kee stood in pen of young cows when she showed Theo her stomach. Animals are able to procreate, so why is infertility only affecting the human population? This isn’t brought up at any point during the film. Shouldn’t all species be on their last legs? Miriam says, “As the sounds of the playground faded, the despair set in.” She reminisces how women at her clinic were miscarrying sooner and sooner until pregnancies just stopped occurring altogether.

Jasper’s connection “arrests” them for being “foreigners” (how can anyone mistake Clive Owen for anything other than British????), and on the bus ride into the camp, Kee’s water breaks. In order to avoid the authorities catching on to Kee’s labor pains, Miriam distracts them and the guards remove her from the bus and execute her.

Theo delivers baby Dylan

Once in the camp, Theo and Kee find sheltered room. Kee lies on a squalid mattress and Theo pours alcohol on his hands to deliver her daughter in a matter of minutes. The slightly premature (and horribly CGI-enhanced) baby Dylan (named after Theo and Julian’s son) is presumably healthy. Like most birth scenes, this one is completely ludicrous. Why do most directors hold back when depicting birth scenes? We see so much senseless violence (and this film is violent from beginning to end) and so much life leaving the world, so what’s wrong with showing the realistic way in which life enters the world? Kee is surprisingly light on her feet when she and Theo find out they have to evacuate STAT because the government is planning to wipe that camp off the map. Granted, her legs are caked in blood and afterbirth from the delivery. That was believable. Although it’s hard to nurse in a war-torn ghetto, there are no shots of Kee feeding Dylan—kind of central to the baby’s survival and mother-child bonding.

A mortally wounded Theo manages to escort Kee and Dylan to safety, and as Dylan begins to cry amid all the rockets and gunfire, everything comes to a halt. Angelic music begins to play. Other fugees break into tears at the sight of the baby and reach out to try to touch her. Soldiers who had entered the tenement housing with guns aimed at all the fugees immediately lower their weapons, drop to their knees, and make the sign of the cross. Theo and Kee get into their boat and make it to sea right before the camp is obliterated. Adrift on the open water, the dying Theo shows Kee how to hold Dylan to soothe her and stop her crying. He bleeds out and slumps over just as The Tomorrow sails toward them. The Human Project does exist. Yet, what is in store for Kee, Dylan, and the human race remains a mystery as the screen abruptly goes black.

Kee and baby Dylan

I did not read James’s novel, and therefore, don’t know how closely Cuaron’s version followed the book. Perhaps the book delved into more of the science or other global issues that occurred at the onset of the mass infertility. One of the main issues for me was that it was unclear whether women were unable to get pregnant, whether men were unable to get them pregnant, or if there was just complete reproductive failure for both sexes. The fact that infertility was limited strictly to humans also didn’t make sense. The fact that outspoken female activists like Julian and Jasper’s wife were brutally hunted and tortured for their resistance was sort of glossed over, as was the strain that Dylan’s death had on Julian and her marriage to Theo. I’d have liked more backstory there.

When I sat down to write this review, I vowed not to use the words “belly,” “bump,” “baby bump,” “preggo,” or “preggers.” I only used “knocked up” because I was quoting a friend of mine when she made the joke about children as tax deductions. I’ve just entered my thirties, and the majority of the women I went to high school with are mothers now. I shouldn’t internalize that there’s something wrong with me because I’m not a mother, but every time I see a picture of a pregnant stomach or a sonogram on Facebook, a little twinge goes through me. Should I want this? Why? Why does fertility turn into yet another unhealthy competition for women? Nobody should be “blamed” for infertility, regardless of gender. It does not make anyone less a woman or a man if they cannot make babies. Instead of obsessing over own biological clocks running down (yes, there are even iPhone apps for that!) or our “completeness” via parenthood, we should focus on shaping the kind of world we want to bring children into.

Carleen Tibbetts lives in Oakland. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Word Riot, Metazen, Monkeybicycle, Coconut, H_NGM_N, The Rumpus, and other journals.