2073 2024 Movie Review
The film addresses the challenges facing the world and is inspired by Chris Marker’s iconic 1962 feature film “La Jetée,” about a time traveler who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity.
“ How did we get here? ” asks Samantha Morton ( The Burning Girls ) in Asif Kapadia’s ( Asif Kapadia ) documentary hybrid in the role of one of the few survivors of the ecological and humanitarian disasters that the director and his co-screenwriter Toni Grisoni ( How I Live Now ) obviously want to warn against. The same question inevitably arises in view of the intentional staging with a worrying tendency towards some of the means and methods denounced in it. On the one hand, there is radicalized rhetoric and striking polemics, on the other, multimedia manipulation.
The argument that the apocalyptic alarmism of futuristic fiction and the sensationalist selectivity of the documentary segments included in it served to criticize totalitarian tendencies and aggressive authoritarianism is only partially valid in a cinematic letter of complaint that is conspicuously lacking in differentiation, depth and context. This documentary deficit is most glaring in the world of action set in San Francisco (“ capital of the Americas ”) of the title year, which Morton’s underground fighter Ghost describes as a post-apocalyptic police state. The horror scenarios shown in this context mix staged and authentic images.
The first show the solid but generically designed sci-fi world as an end-time extreme of climatic, warlike and control-state devastation. The causes of this fearful vision: environmental destruction, mass media manipulation controlled by a neo-libertarian cartel of super-rich tech bros like Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos, a close alliance of anti-democratic dictators like Putin, Urban, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, as well as a fundamental loss of trust in the press and erosion of social democratic structures. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete, abbreviated and as one-sided as the position of the arch-reactionary opposing side.
“Isn’t this a science-fiction movie?” asks Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Philippine online magazine Rappler Maria Ressa in one of the real scenes of Asif Kapadia’s panicked political prognosis. The ambivalent answer is the crux of the hybrid documentary, which, despite its positive ambitions, is unsatisfactory in terms of content. Its strength lies in a handful of short interviews and comments from activists and journalists, whose concise analyses summarize the rapidly growing threat posed by fundamentalism, nationalism and fascism better than the disorienting directive.
