"Children of Men" Directed by: Alfonso Cuaron Starring: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine MPAA rating: R (for graphic violence, disturbing images) Running time: 110 minutes Best suited for: endoftheworld pessimists Least suited for: endoftheworld optimists

Is our future really so bleak? The year is 2027. The last child was conceived 18 years ago, and Mankind is slowly stagnating.

Nobody knows why the human race has become infertile- although with a hopeless future, with every human life that much more precious, it seems we've become even more hell-bent on destroying ourselves. Suicide, murder, aggression and despair have formed a savage dystopia.

We haven't had a really good, thoughtprovoking endoftheworld flick since- well, probably since Terry Gilliam's 1995 "Twelve Monkeys," unless you want to include "28 Days Later." Still, it's been awhile.

Sure, we've had a bunch of scifi-laden nuclear annihilation flicks, but that's something of a cop-out. Push a button and 5 billion people die offscreen. Where's the cinematic joy, the psychological thrill in that?

But a thoughtfully made, contemplative Homo sapiens curtaincloser is long overdue.

Unfortunately (for me, who loves these endoftheworld scenarios), "Children of Men" only partially works as a swan song. The story's rich enough- and certainly brutally realistic enough- but the premise just doesn't gel. There seems little reason to fight for a future that doesn't exist.

Clive Owen plays Theodore Faron, a once-upon-a-time radical who's settled into the same hopeless stupor as most of the world's population. Julianne Moore plays Julian Taylor, Faron's ex-wife. Julian has kept her radical ways and needs somebody she can trust.

A young woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashity) is pregnant, and Julian wants Theo to help get Kee to "The Human Project"- a secret scientific facility somewhere in the Azores, an Atlantic archipelago where, presumably, a group of benevolent scientists are trying to save our species. One assumes a pregnant woman would help their cause considerably.

One would also assume, if one is any sort of optimist, that getting a pregnant woman to her rescuers- or to the moon, for that matter- would be as simple as picking up a telephone. But this world languishes in anarchy. Kee is a "foogie"- an African refugee living in Britain, and foogies are being hunted down, shipped off to isolated, hellish internment camps.

A radical group of immigrants wants to kidnap Kee and use her for their own interests. (Wouldn't their interests coincide with everybody else's at this point?) Faron spends much of his time ducking radical bullets and threading the terrified Kee toward the coast.

He also ducks great gobs of British military bullets as the two sides duke it out inside a foogie ghetto.

I'm probably not alone in noticing the symbolism here- alluding to Jewish Poles in Warsaw under siege by Nazi storm troopers. There is a great deal of social pandering in motion on multiple, subliminal levels. One priceless scene reveals the British elite, as personified by Nigel (Danny Huston), Theo's wealthy cousin who lives far above the squalor and chaos, collecting what's left of the world's great art pieces for his own personal amusement.

Oh, but the rich are so precocious.

Viewed simply as a stylistic thriller, "Children of Men" is fairly decent. There's an edgy docudrama feel to the cinematography and a quick, choppy pace to the editing, which suitably enhances a sense of rushed necessity.

I've heard a few critics liken the film to 1982's brilliant "Blade Runner," and they're not incorrect. Think of this one as a liberal offspring of "Blade Runner" and, perhaps, "Day of the Triffids."

There's another scene midway through the movie where British tanks and rebel immigrants are slaughtering each other- yet the killing immediately ceases when Kee and Theo appear in the street. It's apparent to both sides that this young woman represents all possible hope for the future, and the moment is quite touching.

Yet as soon as Kee is clear of danger, the fighting resumes with barbaric intensity- and I suppose that is my complaint. Some may see humanity as a glass half full, others as half empty. But a pregnant woman appears in the doorway and I'd like to think there's some wiggle room for second thoughts. Director Alfonso Cuaron thinks not and simply drains the glass. The bloodshed continues. One man's vision, I suppose, but ultimately in Cuaron's world, how sad for us all.