15, 114mins

Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic thriller, Children of Men, is an entertaining and utterly barking vision of the future. The year is 2027. Britain is under siege. Immigration has reached epidemic proportions. Central London looks like downtown Mogadishu. There are police cages full of starving refugees at every railway station, and bomb blasts every five minutes. The Orwellian powers-that-be are failing to put a clamp on the Fishes, the terrorists who have given up on green politics and picked up guns and grenade-launchers.

It’s a magnificently deranged satire inspired by a P. D. James novel in which the population of the planet has been affected by a virus — the Pest — that has prevented the birth of a baby for 18 years. The human race is dying out. The colour has been drained out the world — indeed the film itself. News flashes about global chaos clog the airwaves. “Only Britain soldiers on,” concludes a smug BBC.

Clive Owen is the reluctant, unshaven hero, Theo. He plays a government bureaucrat who is kidnapped by his ex-wife, Julianne Moore (the head of Fish, or Fish head if you prefer), and bribed to save a young black refugee called Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey). She is eight months pregnant and when she whips off her dress to show off her bulge, Theo is duly amazed. The Fish are eager to use this miracle to kick-start their armed revolution. But a murderous piece of treachery forces Owen to flee in his socks at five in the morning with the gasping mother-to-be in tow.

The film then descends into a straightforward chase movie complete with psychotic motorbike riders, dodgy second-hand motors and exquisitely dilapidated sets. The couple’s hazy destination is a demonic refugee camp in Bexhill, Kent — which looks like Manhattan in Escape from New York — and from thence by boat to the Human Project, a mysterious pastoral sanctuary where “the greatest minds of the world are working towards a new society”. At least that’s the plan as dreamt up by a stoned hippy (Michael Caine) who lives behind some bushes in a forest near Sutton. Owen, who has acquired a pair of flip-flops by now but little by way of charisma, seems to think this makes perfect sense.

You can’t fault the baroque eccentricity of the script. Cuarón’s crazy dystopia knocks V for Vendetta and 28 Days into a cocked hat. Sci-fi gadgets are used sparingly, and the close-quarter panic and violence are exceptionally realistic. At one point blood sprays on to the camera lens as a tank blasts a tenement block to bits, but Cuarón lets the stock roll, to exhilarating effect.

The moral warning — that it’s impossible to win an ideological war — is eloquently made. But his alarmist fears are rooted in crude right-wing hysteria: fields of burning livestock, jails full of freeloading foreigners, yellowing newspaper headlines about David Beckham and the Iraq War.

The urgency is spiked by some desperately earnest imagery. Cuarón has picked up plenty of tricks and cultivated an enviable visual style since making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban but his Madonna and Child homage is slushy to the point of queasy. And the footage of zebra trotting down The Mall, deer rambling through empty school buildings and flocks of sheep in wartorn Bexhill is frankly ridiculous.

But it still deserves to be watched for some terrific touches of irony, notably the government-sponsored euthanasia kits (dubbed Quietus) sold over the counter, like condoms. England has rarely looked more feral and unappetising. The allegory, unfortunately, is a curate’s egg.

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