Children of Men?

Saw Children of Men last night. What a dark and disturbing movie. As you know, it is based on a PD James novel from 1992, set in a future dystopia, where the world is collapsing in the wake of a plague of infertility, no babies have been born anywhere in the world in almost 20 years. There are crumbling buildings everywhere, military police, caged refugees (exactly why is unclear), street violence and muggings, it's all very bad. Clive Owen somehow gets swept up in a plot to smuggle an undisovered 8-month-pregnant refugee out of England, to a safe island where the "Human Project" is. Perhaps it made more sense in the novel, which I haven't read. Michael Caine is funny as a pot-smoking hippie in the woods. Julianna Moore has a short-lived performance (no pun intended). Our hero Clive Owen is ridiculous running around in a black suit and flip-flops through the rubble and gunfire of the refugee camp, then pouring a pint of whiskey over the mother's pudenda as the baby is crowning. Go see it if you don't have anything better to do, or have a hankering for senseless gratuitous violence. Or kitschy Christ Child imagery.

On another note, I wrote a short story in the late 1980's called "Waiting for Moly Sam," which had a very similar plot: set in the future, after a plague of infertility. But in my story a Cambodian girl one day walks out of her jungle village to go to the city for supplies, 8 months pregnant, and causes a world media sensation (US and WHO scientists studying her, huge refugee camps set up so pilgrims can come and be present for her birth, the whole world watching her daily via satellite addresses), until she disappears in the night, perhaps kidnapped, perhaps escaped. Now I want to make my story into a movie. It'd be so much better. Haha.