Born Again

I've wondered since its release last September when somebody would get around to explaining how little Alfonso Cuarón's excellent film Children of Men has to do with P. D. James's excellent novel The Children of Men. In January, Dana Stevens took a stab—or what looked like it would be a stab—at it, comparing Children of Men to Mike Judge's Idiocracy, a film which is in many ways more faithful than Cuarón's to the message of James's novel. But Stevens missed that point, and with it an opportunity to say where Children of Men went wrong: