We are now only four years out from 2027, the year when
Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian action thriller "
Children of Men" is set. While there's no sign of endemic infertility (knock on wood), our own present is, unfortunately, not far off from the future the film presented.
In "
Children of Men," world governments have started to break down as panic in the last generation takes hold — a shot showing flames and a marching mob in the streets of Washington D.C. is uncomfortably prescient. Only the United Kingdom "soldiers on," but it has become an authoritarian, nationalist state.
The streets are filled with trash and lined with cages housing refugees. The scariest part is how this world doesn't look like a distant future, but merely a worse version of the present. When our reluctant hero Theo Faron (
Clive Owen) rides a commuting train, it resembles one you could take in England today.