Mark Reviews Movies: 2067

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2020

"Even I have trouble understanding time travel sometimes," says the time-traveler's nearly omniscient handheld device. Such a throwaway line is an easy out for writers dealing with theoretical and almost likely impossible science, but when it comes down it, that option better than the alternatives—either spending too much time explaining something, which ultimately and probably won't stand up to logic or scrutiny, or ignoring the creation of any kind of rules for time travel.

In joking about the existence but incomprehensibility of the laws of time travel, writer/director Seth Larney shows a bit more cleverness than we usually expect from stories featuring the gimmick. 2067 is about time travel, yes, but it's more of an exploration of humanity's possible and seemingly impulsive drive to destroy itself, with a bit of murder mystery tossed in for good measure. We don't need to know the detailed and specific laws behind the science here. We just need to know they exist, possess some kind of consistency, and, because of those two things, can be ignored in order to focus on the actual story being told here.

That story is—at first, at least—set in the 2067, after humanity has more or less destroyed the planet's capacity to support life. There's a startling prologue, showing Earth from space. As the planet rotates through a few decades' worth of time, news reports inform us of massive flooding, uncontrollable wildfires, previously unknown epidemics, the level of oxygen being diminished in the atmosphere, and, finally, every major city on the planet going dark in succession. One, of course, realizes that we're essentially living through the prologue of the film's prologue, and the pragmatism of Larney's vision of the future is both appreciated and frightening.

He has created a believable world here, both in terms of its details and, for those who appreciate visual effects, its visual richness, as well as realism. In an unnamed city in Australia (We can only tell because of the accents, because one imagines old notions of nationality doesn't really matter in the post-apocalypse), with skyscrapers reach upward and flying ships doing some menial task and giant video billboards advertising a kind of synthetic oxygen.

That's how the remnants of humankind have survived. Larney sees it both as the scrappy determination to survive and as a kind of cynical view of corporatism. See, there's only one company that produces and distributes the fake oxygen, and when you've cornered the market on one of the key components of life as we know it on this planet, people will do pretty much anything to buy or otherwise obtain that product. On the other side of that equation, the company, as we learn as the story's bigger mysteries unravel, can do whatever it wants with such power.

The world of this devastated city in 2067 is inherently believable, but we should probably leave such descriptions behind at this point. There's a lot more plot to cover—most of it set in the year 2470.

Basically, Ethan (Kodi Smit-McPhee, a fine young actor whose meek mannerisms and sometimes whiny delivery undermine some of the more serious moments here), who currently works maintaining the nuclear power source in the city, is the son of a famed scientist (played by Aaron Glenane). Cutting to the chase, the father invented a portal for time travel, and after sending some radio waves into the future, he received a response—a message stating that Ethan should be sent forward 400 years. The hopeful assumption is that whoever sent the message has a cure for the fatal side effects of the synthetic oxygen.

Ethan leaves behind a sick wife (played by Sana'a Shaik)—the main reasons he decides to go into the future—but takes all of the baggage his father left him—emotional, from his regular absenteeism and apparent suicide, and physical, in the form of an un-removable band that the father implanted into Ethan's wrist. In the future, though, there aren't any obvious signs of human life, although there are plenty of plants (which had gone extinct in Ethan's present).

There's also a bit of a problem in the form of a skeleton near one of the doors to the time-travel portal. It has Ethan's armband, and its clothes have a patch with his name on it. There's also a bullet hole in the skull.

Eventually, Ethan's best friend Jude (Ryan Kwanten) arrives in the future to help him discover the mysteries of what happened to humanity and, more specifically, him. Technically, it's what will happen to them, if we're talking from the characters' perspective of time.

The answer to humankind's fate is, perhaps, a bit obvious, but that's the skeptical side of this vision of our future reaching its logical conclusion. Larney's screenplay is smartly structured in how its cynical thoughts about humankind are built into the Ethan and Jude's exploration of the future, as well as its core mystery. That mystery isn't just about who killed—or will kill, from his perspective—Ethan. It's also about why someone would want to kill the one person who truly believes that people could find a way to save themselves and improve the world for everyone.

We do forget about the time travel—its intrinsic problems and paradoxes—because the film is simultaneously about something less complicated—what Ethan will do when confronted with a seemingly hopeless situation—and much bigger—our actual fate on this planet we so easily abuse. 2067, then, isn't just a clever riff on time-travel adventuring. It has some difficult wisdom to speak, too.

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