Children of Men (2006)
- Unlike modern films, the massive explosion sequence in Children of Men used zero CGI. The crew spent three weeks setting up the practical rig for a single take.
- Despite a very rocky opening weekend, Children of Men went on to gross over 5x its initial budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
Children of Men is a 2006 British-American dystopian science fiction thriller directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Set in 2027, the film depicts a world where two decades of global human infertility have driven civilization into collapse — no child has been born anywhere on Earth for 18 years, and humanity is slowly dying. Clive Owen stars as Theo Faron, a disillusioned former activist in a totalitarian Britain — the last functioning nation, which has devolved into a militarized state imprisoning refugees in cages — who is tasked by a resistance group with escorting Kee, a miraculously pregnant young refugee woman played by Clare-Hope Ashitey, to safety.
Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki created some of the most technically ambitious and emotionally devastating long takes in cinema history — a car ambush filmed from inside the vehicle in a single continuous shot, and the climactic battle sequence through a refugee camp rendered in an eight-minute unbroken take that follows Theo through active combat, collapsing buildings, and a ceasefire triggered by the sound of a baby's cry. Children of Men earned $70 million worldwide on a $76 million budget, a commercial disappointment that obscured what many critics and filmmakers now consider one of the greatest science fiction films ever made.
