It’s been three years since its original release but Children Of Men’s stark, dystopian warning now seems even more relevant than ever.

Global recession, a flu pandemic, surveillance, torture and increasingly shrill paranoia about immigration – like all the best science fiction, this PD James adap is only a few steps removed from our reality.

Clive Owen is perfectly cast as our hero, Theo, an ex-activist struggling through a dying world in which women can no longer have children.

Crumpled, depressed and left punch-drunk by the speed with which the world has fallen into ruin, he is inadvertently drawn into a quest to protect the first pregnant woman in 18 years – an illegal refugee, no less – from political extremists, brutal police and the attendant chaos that comes from the fall of civilisation as we know it.

He’s aided, and abetted, by sterling turns from Michael Caine as a tragically puckish hippy, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a protestor of uncertain morals.

The blistering Blu-ray treatment dished out here shows off director Alfonso Cuarón’s ambitious single-shot approach to filming action to predictably mesmerising effect, but also uses the technology to do more than just shine up the pixels.

Most of the special features are reprised from the two-disc Special Edition DVD and – boo, hiss – they’re still presented in their original standard-definition full-frame format.

Annoying, but not enough to detract too much from a spread of content that still impresses, most notably in the half-hour featurette ‘The  Possibility Of Hope’, which ditches the usual on-set platitudes and instead turns to sociologists, economists and philosophers to chew
over the weighty themes and subtexts.

There’s still no commentary, but we do now get the next best thing: U-Control, a Picture-in-Picture feature that lets you call up behind-thescenes
footage and interview snippets as the movie plays.

It also lets you savour in full the horribly plausible propaganda that litters the background. This is a film rich in detail, both visual and symbolic, and U-Control excels in picking out seemingly inconsequential moments and images to better appreciate the intricate tapestry Cuarón has woven.

Children Of Men is arguably the best British science-fiction film of the last quarter century. A riveting parable, it never allows action or technology to
detract from the intellectual meat that defines the genre’s classics. Now, finally, it has a disc to match.

Verdict:

Taking you deeper into a movie loaded with powerful and challenging ideas, this disc finds Blu-ray finally proving its worth.