One can only surmise that Universal weren’t ready for a gloomy British dystopian sci-fi flick when they dumped Children of Men unceremoniously into theatres last year. The dreadfully over-the-top trailer didn’t really help sell the film particularly well either. But the film has emerged as a great end-of-year surprise, a powerhouse of bleak beauty whose effects -- both dramatic and visual -- are so gut-wrenchingly realistic and contemporary one hesitates to call it ‘sci-fi’. Adapted from P. D. James’ novel, Children of Men imagines a not-so-distant world that has plummeted into chaos, and more significantly, one that is incapable of bearing children. Clive Owen gives a superbly nuanced performance as Theo, who is given the tricky job -- from his ex-wife and radical terrorist Julianna Moore -- of transporting a pregnant women to the Human Project, an organistion dedicated to finding the solution to the world’s birth problem. Michael Caine lends some well-placed comic relief as his hippie friend Jasper. Much has been made about the film’s virtuoso camerawork -- long Steadicam tracking shots that make you go “how did they do that?” -- and rightly so, as they are some of the most amazing captured on film. But Children of Men isn’t just about visual dazzle. Unlike any mainstream sci-fi film of recent years, it’s a rarity of the genre that’s brave and intelligent enough to tie its thought-provoking ideas, startling action sequences and poetic direction together into something quite special and trascendentally human.