Analysis of the Narrative Structure of Children of Men

In Children of Men, the overall story deals with a dystopian United Kingdom in the year 2027. The human race has become infertile and the world at large has fallen into a state of war and oppression. The Objective Story Throughline, therefore, centers around a problematic Situation.

 

In a Situational Throughline, you pass through four signposts - The Past, The Present, Progress, and the Future. These four items represent all the ways one can look at a situation. Don’t believe it? Try to describe a problematic situation without using one of those four terms. Close to impossible.

The order in which these four signposts appear are different for every story. They don’t have to be in the order listed above. In fact, there are a whole host of other factors that determine the order: if the story is a Tragedy, if the Main Character changes, what kind of plot device drives the story forward, etc.

In Children of Men the signposts have a very definite progression.

At the start we are dealing with The Present -The world mourns the murder of 18-year old “Baby Diego” - the last baby to have been born on earth. Terrorist bombings have become commonplace in the fight for immigrant rights. While the rest of the world has descended into chaos - Britain “Marches On.”

In the second act we find ourselves amongst the ruins of an abandoned and delapidated preschool as Miriam tells Theo of how the plague of infertility began (The Past). There they meet Syd who agrees to take him to the Bexhill refugee camp as faux prisoners.

Once in the refugee camp, matters change for the worse (Progress). An uprising amongst the immigrant refugees threatens the tentative stability imposed by British forces. Theo and Khee scarcely make their way to the docks as tension escalates into an all-out war.

They board the boat prepared for them and row out to the buoy. And here is where the story stops.

Theo bleeds out just as the boat captained by the Human Project arrives - a boat aptly named The Tomorrow. (Future) Now, if you’re like me you were shaking your head, “No! This can’t be it!” when the credits started to roll. You wanted more story! Somehow you just felt like there was more to tell - as if there were still 20 to 30 minutes left to go.

My contention is that the filmmaker wanted to leave the story open-ended (and later, I’ll have a quote from the director himself that this is in fact, what he had intended). In this way, the filmmaker leaves it up to the audience to fill in that last blank. Will the world collapse in despair? Or will the hope of children win out?

 

In short, the filmmaker is leaving it up to us what the future will really be like.

But in leaving this last part out, he left most general audience members feeling frustrated and cheated. Most listeners of a story want to know “how it all turned out.” I believe that sense of frustration comes from the fact that there was still one more act to play out. If we had followed Kee onto The Tomorrow and learned what the Human Project was and what hope Kee’s baby held for the future, the story would’ve felt more complete. In fact, it would’ve been complete as all four acts would’ve been explored thoroughly.