Dana Stevens at Slate has an interesting article finding linkages between Mike Judge’s Idiocracy and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

Well, I happened to watch Children of Men again last night and I was suddenly struck by its resemblance to Apocalypto.

Consider this. Both are “journey” films. Both recount the actions of a man striving to save or rescue a pregnant woman. Both culminate in a hellish vision of a civilization in its death throes, charged with garish and even incomprehensible emblems of humanity reduced to an animal level. And both films end with images of a ship arriving, offering either hope or hints of further disaster.

Any student of cinema knows that films bearing such similarities arriving at the same time is not unusual. There are broad coincidences, such as Volcano and Dante’s Peak arriving near simultaneously, and there are more subtle coincidences, such as a resemblances between Children of Men and Apocalypto (and Idiocracy). Meanwhile, The Nativity Story, most obviously, and Pan’s Labyrinth also concern themselves wholly or in part with the protection of an unborn child.

Obviously it’s the zeitgeist. In this post 911, post Guantanamo world, we are affected every day by terror alerts, long lines at airports, and a general climate of suspiciousness, that leads to a fear of others and a terror of what unjust mishaps could happen to ourselves.

But both films also have a religious component, which many viewers are not going to find as part of their zeitgeist. It’s unclear how extensively Gibson’s retrogressive conservative Catholic sect rules his life but his films certainly traffic in suspicions about the fate of people or cities that get lost upon the true way (there is also a homoerotic undercurrent, too, that goes back to his first directorial effort, The Man Without a Face, way back in 1993, but that is a whole other column). Meanwhile, Children of Men is a form of nativity story, with several in jokes. The young mother pretends for a second that her birth is virgin, and, like Saint Francis, Clive Owen’s Theodore Faron attracts animals to his side. However, ultimately Cuarón’s film pulls its punches, unlike the much different source book, which is more allegorical and comes down harshly against such things as euthanasia and other “liberal” and unChristian policies. People running to the book after an enthusiastic experience with the movie may be startled by what they find there.

In any case, there’s the coincidence between Children of Men and Apocalypto. I’m not sure of its full implications, but something is going on out there and even our filmmakers, who dwell in protected living quarters far from the rude hubbub of the street, are feeling it.

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