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.^b3 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.^{b1 b2} He flinches, walks on, and uncaps a flask of whiskey into his coffee.^b1 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 years¹) and grows excellent weed.^{b2 b4} The next morning Theo is hooded off the street and dragged into a black van by the Fishes, a refugee-rights militia.^b5 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.^b6 They were married once, before the death of their infant son Dylan in the 2008 flu pandemic broke them apart.² 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.^{b6 b8} Theo agrees, for £5,000.^b7

Kee is pregnant

The papers come with a stipulation: Theo must personally escort the refugee.^b9 He climbs into a car with Julian, Kee, the Fishes lieutenant Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the midwife Miriam (Pam Ferris), and a driver.^b11 Within minutes a burning car blocks the country road. Motorcycles ambush the convoy and shoot Julian through the throat.^b13 She dies in Theo's arms in the back seat.^b14 Luke shoots a police officer at a checkpoint to keep the convoy moving and they retreat to the Fishes' farmhouse, where Julian's body is dealt with off-screen and Luke is toasted as the new leader.^{b14 b15 b16} In the barn, Kee unbuttons her shirt and shows Theo her bare, pregnant belly — the first pregnancy in eighteen years.^b17 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.^b19

Jasper plots the route to the Human Project

Before dawn Theo wakes Kee, coaxes Miriam from her bed, and hot-wires the Fishes' car.^b20 They drive through morning fog with Kee hidden in the cargo space behind the rear seats and arrive at Jasper's cottage.^{b21 b22} Jasper proposes the route: a border-guard friend named Syd will get them into the Bexhill camp; once inside, they will meet the Human Project's boat, the Tomorrow, at the last two weather buoys en route at sunset.^b233 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."⁴ See Faith vs Chance (Jasper's koan).^b25 The Fishes track them to the cottage. Jasper sends Theo, Kee, and Miriam out the back through the woods while he stays behind.^b26 Luke shoots him on the path outside the cottage while Theo watches from a hill above.^b27

The Bexhill camp

Syd drives the three of them toward Bexhill in the back of an immigration bus.^b28 At the checkpoint, Kee's water breaks and she is in real contractions; Miriam stages a loud religious-chant trance ("Saint Gabriel, come to our aid")⁵ to pull the guards off Kee, and is dragged off the bus and not seen again.^b29 Inside the camp, a refugee woman named Marichka takes them through a courtyard market into a tenement apartment.^b30 Kee goes into labor.^b31 The baby — a girl — is born in the tenement bathroom and her cry breaks the apartment open: Marichka stares, weeps, crosses herself.^b32

The Uprising and the Tomorrow

At dawn the Uprising erupts. Government tanks roll into the camp.^b33 Luke and his Fishes break into the apartment and forcibly take Kee and the baby.^b34 In the corridors and stairwells of the bombed-out housing block, Theo retrieves them.^b35 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.^b36 The ceasefire ends as a tank reopens fire on the building. Theo is shot.^b37 He gets Kee and the baby into a rowboat at the inlet and pushes off into the fog.^b38 In the fog the Tomorrow emerges. Kee names the baby Dylan, after Theo's lost son. Theo dies in the boat.^b39 The screen cuts to black, and the sound of children's laughter plays over the end credits.^b40 See The Closing Sound.