Children of Men

Alfonso Cuarón’s film is remembered for its long takes, less for how they were built. The roadside ambush runs four minutes and seven seconds, the Bexhill battle six minutes and eighteen, the birth scene three minutes and nineteen. None is genuinely one take: the ambush was shot in six sections across four locations in a week and joined by five digital transitions, Bexhill from five takes in two locations. Effects supervisor Frazer Churchill called it the illusion of an uninterrupted move. The car was purpose built. Seats tilted and dropped so performers could clear the lens, the windscreen swung open to let the camera pass through, and a crew of four including the cinematographer rode on the roof. Emmanuel Lubezki argued against generating the scene in a computer and defended a raw documentary texture; blood that hit the lens in the fighting was left in. Across a hundred and nine minutes the cause of the infertility is never explained. The world arrives through posters, news crawls and cages in the background. Worth it if you accept that the camera picks who to follow and what you miss behind it waits for a rewatch. Skip it if dystopias owe you a scene setting out the rules, and a seventy six million dollar production that never explains reads as a gap.