Plot Summary (Children of Men) Children of Men (2006)
The world has not seen a baby in eighteen years
It is 2027. Humanity is infertile. No human child has been born since 2009, and the world has spent eighteen years sliding into orderly collapse. Most nation-states have failed; Britain has not, but the price of stability is a militarized police state that herds refugees into coastal cages and ships them by rail to a camp at Bexhill-on-Sea. Theo Faron (Clive Owen) — once a 1990s activist, now a depressed civil servant at the Ministry of Energy — opens the film stepping out of a London coffee shop seconds before it explodes. He flinches, walks on, and uncaps a flask of whiskey into his coffee. The baseline of his life is organized withdrawal: the news as background noise, alcohol in the cup, the routine that absorbs the disruption.
Theo is abducted by his ex-wife's refugee militia
Theo takes the rest of the day off and drives to the woods cottage of Jasper Palmer (Michael Caine), an aging hippie ex-cartoonist who tends his catatonic wife Janice (an ex-photojournalist tortured into silence during the activist years) and grows excellent weed. The next morning Theo is hooded off the street and dragged into a black van by the Fishes, a refugee-rights militia. The hood comes off and he is face to face with Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), his ex-wife, the leader of the Fishes, on every police poster in London. They were married once, before the death of their infant son Dylan in the 2008 flu pandemic broke them apart. She needs transit papers. There is a young African refugee — Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) — who must be moved to the south coast and handed off to a mythical underground called the Human Project. Theo's cousin Nigel runs the Ministry's Ark of Arts inside Battersea Power Station and can issue papers. Theo agrees, for £5,000.
Kee is pregnant
The papers come with a stipulation: Theo must personally escort the refugee. He climbs into a car with Julian, Kee, the Fishes lieutenant Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the midwife Miriam (Pam Ferris), and a driver. Within minutes a burning car blocks the country road. Motorcycles ambush the convoy and shoot Julian through the throat. She dies in Theo's arms in the back seat. The Fishes pay off two corrupt cops to dispose of her body and retreat to a farmhouse, where Luke is toasted as the new leader. In the barn, Kee unbuttons her shirt and shows Theo her bare, pregnant belly — the first pregnancy in eighteen years. Late that night Theo overhears Luke and another Fish, Patric, planning to use the baby as a propaganda symbol for an armed Uprising. He learns that Julian was murdered by her own people, on Luke's orders, to consolidate the leadership.
Jasper plots the route to the Human Project
Before dawn Theo wakes Kee, coaxes Miriam from her bed, and hot-wires the Fishes' car. They drive through morning fog with Kee hidden in the cargo space behind the rear seats and arrive at Jasper's cottage. Jasper proposes the route: a corrupt cop friend named Syd will smuggle them past the Bexhill checkpoint disguised as refugees; once inside, they will meet the Human Project's boat, the Tomorrow, at the second weather buoy at sunset. Over dinner Jasper performs his "pull my finger" routine and his coin-trick koan about faith versus chance — "Everything is a mythical, cosmic battle between faith and chance." See Faith vs Chance (Jasper's koan). The Fishes track them to the cottage. Jasper sends Theo, Kee, and Miriam out the back through the woods while he stays behind. Luke shoots him in his living room while Theo watches from cover.
The Bexhill camp
Syd drives the three of them toward Bexhill in the back of an immigration bus. At the checkpoint, Miriam stages a noisy fake labor to distract the guards from Kee, who is also visibly pregnant; Miriam is dragged off the bus and is not seen again. Inside the camp, a Romani woman named Marichka takes them through a courtyard market into a tenement apartment. Kee goes into labor. The baby — a girl — is born in the tenement bathroom and her cry breaks the apartment open: Marichka stares, weeps, crosses herself.
The Uprising and the Tomorrow
At dawn the Uprising erupts. Government tanks roll into the camp. Luke and his Fishes break into the apartment and forcibly take Kee and the baby. In the corridors and stairwells of the bombed-out housing block, Theo retrieves them. He carries Kee and the baby down through artillery fire. As the cry registers, soldiers stop firing — for a moment the entire war pauses for the first newborn in eighteen years. The ceasefire ends as a tank reopens fire on the building. Theo is shot. He gets Kee and the baby into a rowboat at the inlet and pushes off into the fog. In the fog the Tomorrow emerges. Kee names the baby Dylan, after Theo's lost son. Theo dies in the boat. The screen cuts to black, and the sound of children's laughter plays over the end credits. See The Closing Sound.