Children of Men is as glum and humorless as its setting, a slowly decaying near-future where no child has been born in 18 years. It is also not subtle; the miracle woman with a miracle pregnancy, sort of a McGuffin with dialogue, is named Kee (as in “Key"), and the ship that will take her to the saviors at the Human Project is called the Tomorrow.

If this were a more allegorical movie, given to potent symbolism and broad strokes of human behavior, that would be one thing. But Children of Men is so dreary that it’s hard to care what any of the characters do. Even their instinct to survive is carried out as if by rote, rather than by passion. Unbroken shots of neighborhoods under siege that might otherwise exhilirating, or at least involving, then become merely a study in directing technique without any sense of dire urgency. Is it a success or a failure when a film creates an atmosphere of grim resignation so complete that the audience feels it, too?

This failure to connect would be less of a heartbreak if Children of Men didn’t want so badly to be serious, even profound. In fact, that may be the first sign of danger; the worst kind of Serious Film is the one that wants you to know very much that it’s a Serious Film.

Clive Owen plays Theo, an office functionary in England, 2027. And though Theo is divorced, alone, and working in a job that seems essentially pointless in a dying world, he just can’t bring himself to take the government’s suicide pills. No particular reason; he’s just not a quitter.

Which may be why his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) reappears in his life, now at the head of an underground movement to decriminalize immigration. She needs his help transporting Kee to the sages at the Human Project, and she trusts few other people to protect her so completely as she knows Theo will.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of “impending apocalypse” movies: ones where the protagonists can do something about the impending apocalypse, and ones where they can’t. The latter tend to be grim and reductive affairs, the most popularly known examples being George Romero’s Dead series. The former almost always involve some kind of episodic journey, wherein our heroes see strange sights, meet strange people, and suffer surprise casualities. There will also be the occasional noble sacrifice.

Children of Men follows this journey formula with few deviations, and while it successfully simulates the lifestyle of refugees escaping persecution, it fails to provide anything new or interesting. Even the actors seem reserved; Clive Owen, who put his guardedness to brilliant use in Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, here seems only committed to his task because there’s simply nothing else to be done. Michael Caine, as Theo’s stoner friend Jasper, offers little more than baldly expositional chunks of dialogue. Julianne Moore doesn’t have enough screentime to get much characterization done.

I can see where there may be pieces of a more involving movie, half-buried in Children of Men. One of Jasper’s speeches touches on the many tantalizing theories behind mankind’s sudden infertility; none are investigated, and eventually the whole situation is written off as the judgement of fate. But if that’s so, why, after 18 years, is a new child born? It can’t be because mankind figured out how to get along better; if there’s one thing this film does well, it’s showing exactly how much more brutal to each other we become when faced with certain extinction. These are interesting questions, but you won’t find the answers to any of them here.