It’s nice to know that not every movie about British people has to be obnoxiously boring. Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, and that black English dude who shows up in every European movie that has a black guy in it make up a solid cast that supports a smart, visually fresh, and spookily believable take on the not-too-distant future.

The film begins with the news report of Baby Diego’s death, which the entire world seems to mourn. The catch is, Baby Diego has died at 27 – they still call him “Baby” because he is now the last person shat into the film’s modern day world (seeing as how infertility struck women like a plague back in 2009).

Why and how this epidemic hit isn’t ever explained in “Children of Men,” but the film is clever enough to where one can be sure that detail’s on purpose. Anyway, Theo (Clive) starts out as a political activist-turned-Joe Shmoe who has given up on making a difference in a world where “chance defeats faith” and the government of Britian, hell-bent on keeping its country pure in a time of global, yes, terrorism, is literally caging illegal immigrants.

However, when he finds himself to be the only hope for saving Ki, a young woman who has found herself nine months pregnant, from the uncertainties of a life run by people who will use the baby (dead or alive) for their own political agenda, Theo… Well, you get it. Action. Suspense. Escapes. Swearing.

The real gem of the movie is the way it presents its world of the future without stylish showiness. The cinematography, set design, editing, art direction, and so-forth blend such a magnificent backdrop to all of this mayhem, one could say the best performances are given by the extras, because they blend into the film’s morbid décor as if they’re just the people who were doing their thing as some crew came on by and decided to shoot a flick in their hometown.

While the dialogue falls into th oft-seen-in-these-other -worldly-movies’ trap of exposition at times while suffering also from certain clichés like “I’ll be fine” just before the character dies, the script has plenty of unexpected twists and new ideas to bring to the table, and fortunately the cast has enough presence to make lines that could be atrocious seem ho-hum.

If anything, “Children of Men” has made a mark in film when it comes to different takes on where we’re going as a human race, one that manages to entertain us enough to where we get the message without having it shoveled down our throats at the last moment like in the horrific conclusion to the otherwise-commendable “Minority Report.”

Without trying for attention, details from the Holocaust to the war zones of today pop up throughout, and there is one sequence of raw violence where you will at some point possibly stop and say, “Holy shit, has this all really been one camera shot?”  Do yourself a favor, see this one for yourself instead of asking your stoner friend what they thought of it – chances are they were baked and, to their dismay, ran out of popcorn much sooner than they thought they would for the price they paid, then threw their bag on the floor with a cotton-mouthed, “Fugg thi moobie!”