Hope in Children of Men and Serenity
Building on the melancholia of the films analysed thus far, a comparison between Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, based in a world in mourning for its future, and the space opera Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005), which concludes the story arc of Whedon’s TV series Firefly, gives an opportunity to further the discussion of history through an analysis of two mythic formations of hope, the redeemer and the frontier respectively. The chapter rounds off the theme of personal redemption versus the redemption of the collective, and the theme of obligation to the past necessitating a politics not of a deferred future but of redeeming the present in the name of the numberless dead, by an analysis of what does and does not count as human in the two films.