Children of Men understands that the collapse of civic trust produces architecture.

The Bexhill refugee camp is the film's moral center and its conceptual mistake.

Those concrete barriers, that razor wire, those armed guards in full view—that's theater. That's what power looks like when it still needs to announce itself — when it still operates under the premise that citizens might witness exclusion and object to it.

The film was made in 2006, and by then the actual sorting mechanism had already moved. Watch the scene where Kee moves through London — nobody stops her with visible force, and the city simply doesn't acknowledge her presence. She moves through spaces where algorithms have already decided what she can access, what she can buy, where she can be.

Cuarón was right that infertility breaks the social contract and that exclusion intensifies, but he imagined exclusion would become more visible, more defended, more militarized — instead, it became invisible, preference, a system so distributed that no single person decides to keep you out and the system simply optimizes around you, sorts you, and you experience it as the world's indifference rather than anyone's malice. That feels cleaner, scales better, and requires no camps because the camps are algorithmic now, and they're everywhere, and you can't photograph them.