If there was no tomorrow, how would you act today? This is the question “Children of Men” answers in its first minutes with an explosion inside a building, followed by a shot of a horribly mangled woman walking out of the blast screaming into the camera.

Clearly, if you’re looking for rainbows, sunshine and snuggly talking animals, this is not your movie.

Based off the 1992 P.D. James novel, “Children of Men” takes place in the year 2027 during the rapidly approaching extinction of the human race. A sudden global fertility crisis has kept humans from reproducing for the past 18 years.

A collapsing Britain, where the movie takes place, is the last shard of civilization not to be swallowed up by marauders lashing out at their seemingly inescapable fate. The country is an authoritarian police state striving to keep out refugees and battling activist groups with tanks, guns and bombs. I could see some Republicans in the theater taking notes behind me.

The story follows Theodore Faron (Clive Owen), a burnt-out ex-activist, whose past comes knocking on his door in the form of his ex-lover, and leader of an activist group, Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore).

Days after the last human to be born is killed at the age of 25, Moore asks for Owen’s help transporting a pregnant woman, and mankind’s last hope, to a secret organization attempting to cure the world’s fertility crisis.

From the opening scene to the credits, this movie demands your attention and kicks you in the spine anytime you think it’s safe to look away for a second. The cinematography is the engine that drives this dystopian suspense flick.

Director Alfonso Cuarón, formerly director of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” uses hand-held camera shots to develop a personal and gritty feel for the audience. This also creates a believable “future movie.”

Most movies set in the not-too-distant future suffer from spending too much trying to show off their special effects in the form of gadgets the writers think will exist some day. Think of “Minority Report.” “Children of Men” never falls prey to long panning shots of expansive futuristic CG cities; instead, the audience is always close by the side of the characters. This allows the story to dictate the pacing of the movie, not the setting.

The use of long takes, in conjunction with hand-held shots, heightens the sense of realism.

In one scene a roaming gang of maniacs chase the main characters while they attempt to escape while driving in reverse. Wow, that sounds like eight trillion — yes trillion — car chase sequences I’ve been forced to endure most my life. Thanks to Cuarón’s excellent use of the long take, I found myself glued to the screen.

During the whole chase the camera is inside the car panning over all the characters and looking out the windshield watching the pursuers getting closer, so viewers get the sense of real-time action. The crescendo of it all comes in a bloody street battle between police and activists captured in a seven-minute-long take.

While the action and camera work is top-notch, the acting suffers slightly. It’s nothing blatant that’s wrong the performances; instead, there a collective blandness.

Perhaps the dialogue was at fault. I can’t count how many times I heard the phrase, “It’s her choice.” Most of us like underlying themes not to bludgeon us to death in the dialogue.

Seeing Michael Caine play a dope fiend made me feel dirty inside. I can’t explain it.

“Children of Men,” is the first movie in a long while to allow me to write the words “realistic” “sci-fi” in the same sentence.

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