Jon Hastings (welcome back, Forager!) liked Children of Men but found its political ideology muddled in terms of the dystopian society it posits. That’s a fair criticism, I think. For starters, if the United Kingdom’s work force was slowly dying out, never to be replaced, I’m not sure how ruthlessly tracking down and deporting illegal immigrants would help, or even make sense from a gut-level scapegoating perspective. Moreover, the practice of keeping the pre-deportation illegals in cages outside of commuter rail lines for all the world to see runs counter to what we generally know to be true of human rights violations within Western countries–out of sight, out of mind. A lot of the anti-immigrant commercials you see and hear throughout the film take this logical flaw even further by hammering home the notion that illegals are the employees and even the relatives of good hard-working native Britons; those are difficult bonds to break, even in much more elaborate and totalitarian fictional dystopias like 1984, and though that would be an obvious problem faced by a government dedicated to a radical approach toward illegal immigration, I doubt they’d want to bring it up themselves (even to undermine it) if they could avoid it. Finally, if the career trajectories of the Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine characters are to be used as an indicator, the point at which everything started going totally wrong was the Iraq War, which (as you might have guessed) I find to be an enormously shallow and solipsistic view of how the world actually works and has worked for time immemorial.
All that being said, I still found the dystopia convincing and frightening, and I think that at least in part that comes from approaching those elements as horror. I’ve taken that view of more internally consistent dystopias and post-apocalyptic fictions (again, 1984, but also (say) The Handmaid’s Tale and any number of zombie movies) for a long time, because of my personal association of horror with hopelessness (you generally don’t get any more hopeless than dystopias). Children of Men fails as a dystopia that one could logically arrive at from its constituent elements, I think, but succeeds despite that because of the way those elements add up as a big frightening collage of Things That Are Horrifying. Domestic terrorism, ecological and economic breakdown, torture, prisoner abuse, large-scale human rights violations by a Western nation, internecine warfare between “freedom fighters,” increased video surveillance, assassinations, plausibly deniable action by the government against journalists and dissidents, Abu Ghraib, Vladimir Putin, the drug war, limited nuclear exchanges, pandemics, Islamic fascism, urban warfare, intrusive media and advertising presence, euthanasia, and (I think this is the real emotional key to why the film works and I haven’t seen anyone comment on it) the constant presence of animals in great danger, as undiluted an conveyor of helplessness as it gets–put it all together and it works in the same way that, for example, The Shining takes axes and ghosts and corpses and haunted houses and child abuse and rivers of blood and isolation and psychics and puts them all together and that works.