The Human Project Children of Men (2006)

The Human Project is the only positive content in the film, and you never see it

The Human Project is the off-screen organization the Fishes claim to be working for — a network of scientists and refugees who, somewhere in the Azores or the open Atlantic, are trying to solve the infertility crisis. Their boat, the Tomorrow, is meant to collect Kee and her baby at the second weather buoy off Bexhill at sunset. Theo, Kee, and Miriam spend the entire second half of the film trying to reach it. When the boat finally emerges from the fog in the film's final minute, Theo is dying in the rowboat and the camera holds on the boat's name — Tomorrow — for two beats, then cuts to black.

The Human Project is the film's only positive content. It is the only thing in the world of 2027 Britain that is trying. And the film never shows you a single member of it.

"The Human Project is faith made into a noun." — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) (book, not available online)

The structural argument: hope cannot be filmed

Cuarón (in Children of Men) has been explicit that the choice to keep the Human Project off-screen was central to the film's argument:

"If we had shown the Human Project, the audience would have judged it. It would have been a place — a building, some scientists in coats. The whole film would collapse into that one image. The Human Project has to remain a possibility, not a destination." — Alfonso Cuarón, Indiewire (2007)

The decision is consistent across the film's structure. We never see:

• A child older than 18.
• A successful birth other than Kee's.
• The Human Project's leadership.
• The result of Kee's arrival on the Tomorrow.
• The future, if there is one.

What we see instead is the trying. Theo carrying Kee. Marichka crossing herself. The soldiers stopping firing for thirty seconds in the stairwell. The boat emerging from the fog. The film's wager is that hope, on screen, can only register as motion toward something it does not show.

The Tomorrow is a name, not a vehicle

The boat's name does the same work. Tomorrow — the unmarked future, the day that has not happened. The film does not name the boat Hope or Future or Salvation; it names it the most ordinary word for the thing it is most asking the audience to believe in. When Theo dies in the rowboat and Kee names her daughter Dylan, the boat is just behind her in the fog. The film ends before any of them step onto its deck.

Žižek read the off-screen utopia as the film's bravest move

Slavoj Žižek, in his commentary on the Possibility of Hope DVD documentary, identified the off-screen Human Project as the film's most politically radical gesture:

"It's a film about the possibility of hope, but it never shows you the hope. The hope is the ship in the fog. The hope is the laughter at the end. It's not anything you can point at and call by a name." — Slavoj Žižek, The Possibility of Hope (2007)

The wager pays off in the closing sound

The final commitment to keeping the Human Project unseen is the cut to black. The film does not show Kee on the Tomorrow. It does not show the baby being received by scientists. It does not show a single image of the future. It shows the boat in the fog and then nothing. Then it plays the sound of children's laughter over the credits. See The Closing Sound. The audio is the film's bet: that the future can be heard but not photographed.