Children of Men’s references feel at once calculated and perfunctory—bits of faux-political plumage affixed to what is, in essence, a post-apocalyptic cousin of Casablanca, with Owen in the Bogart role and Moore playing a combination of Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid.[…]
[For] the most part, the film’s ripped-from-recent-headlines touches seem like opportunistic attempts to add depth to what is, in its curiously hard heart, the most elaborate cinematographer’s reel in recent memory.
— Matt Zoller Seitz (Slant Magazine)
Infertility is but a metaphor that enables Children of Men to entertain the possibility of No Future. The only parents these days who assume their children will inhabit a better world are either those living in the gated communities of the super-rich or the immigrants imported to tend their gardens. That these 'fugees are visualized as the persecuted rabble of a crumbling empire is only one of this movie's inconvenient truths.
— J. Hoberman: Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) (2012)
Although Miriam and Theo are represented as selfless heroes, the devaluing of life and the intentions of other “soldiers” in the film seem suspect. For example, Miriam perceives Jasper’s death as a necessary sacrifice to protect Kee from the British government at the same time that Luke plots Julian’s murder as a necessary casualty in preserving the life of Kee’s child for the Fishes’ political goals. That so many lives must be sacrificed for the safety of a select few is a dynamic present at multiple levels throughout the film.[…]
Although some might find it liberating that the female body’s reproductive capacity is no longer its defining feature in the context of the film, it is unclear whether such a change in women’s material reality could truly lift the oppressive association of intellect and creativity with masculinity and bodily reproduction with femininity. [Certainly,] Children of Men frames the female body as a hostile territory whose barrenness is a sign of its failure.
— Nicole L. Sparling: Without a Conceivable Future: Figuring the Mother in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
Synopsis: In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child's birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.