2073 - Mark Reviews Movies

2073, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 26, 2024

In 2073, the world of the eponymous year is in ruins and under a totalitarian state for some. It is some 30-something years following "the Event," which led to this dystopian future. We also learn the Event doesn't actually constitute a single event but a slow creep of assorted issues, and with that kind of vague thinking, it's little wonder director Asif Kapadia's fiction-documentary hybrid feels like such an uncertain project.

The basic idea of this futuristic world—set in New San Francisco, the new capital of the new nation-state "the Americas"—is that society is extremely divided between the haves, mostly unseen and unspecified numbers of the wealthy living in towering skyscrapers, and the have-nots, everyone else living on ground level amidst the wreckage of urban decay and natural disasters. The imagery of this city is admittedly striking, combining real footage of misty skylines, smog-filled skies, signs of poverty, and police violence with visual effects and practical set design. The future of the movie is hypothetical, but particular details of more contemporary cellphone footage, news reports, and bits of advertising tell us that future is also, in a way, right now.

That's the fundamental warning of Kapadia's movie, which begins with an actual warning from our main, unnamed protagonist. She's played by Samantha Morton, who narrates how it's too late for her to do anything about this world but hoping that we heed what will happen. The director's casting is smart, if only because the close-ups of Morton pondering how everything went wrong in so many ways convey a degree of utter, hopeless melancholy that might be the most convincing element of the movie.

The foundation of this mishmash of a narrative definitely isn't. For one thing, the vision of this futuristic world may look frightening, but its logistics are too broad for us to understand it as anything other than a generic dystopia. Oddly, Kapadia also includes certain specifics that make it feel almost too of the present day and present concerns, such as throwaway footage of the children of a certain President and an ad for technology that's already out of date by our current day.

Is it possible that in almost 50 years those particular people will still be alive and somehow look their current ages? Anything's possible, perhaps, as technology advances at a rapid rate, but if the people of the movie's theory really do cause the collapse of society and liberal democracy, it won't be them living with and in control of the consequences.

The real point of the movie isn't the fictional component, which just makes it even stranger to include as such a significant part of the story. No, the core of this is the documentary element, which includes interviews with various journalists and experts on assorted subjects, including climate and artificial intelligence. The first group explains how authoritarianism is on the rise across the world at the moment, with the genuinely terrifying but hopefully questionable statistic that an overwhelming majority of the world's population is presently living under authoritarian rule.

The journalists, who have personal experience dealing with autocrats and wannabe demagogues in places like the Philippines and India and the United Kingdom, offer brief summaries of how such leaders come to power and then exploit it. At this point, Kapadia seems late to the discussion for such a primer about figures like former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and the xenophobic basis of the Brexit campaign, and it might only be dumb luck that connections to one U.S. President have suddenly become relevant again.

With all of that in place, Morton's character roams the ravaged city, scavenges for food and supplies, and sits in quiet contemplation of her and her fallen society's past. There's not even an effort to merge the fictional tale with the documentary elements of the movie. It's the anonymous survivor's story one moment, and then, we're suddenly hit by a talking head explaining just how dire things could become in our future.

The rest of the warning is a jumble of worries, from the climate crisis to how the technology we use every day is collecting more and more of our private data without us being aware of or caring about it. As A.I. progresses to use that data, tech billionaires and their companies could use it to make humans irrelevant, while making sure we're distracted enough not to notice.

These arguments are technically sound, although that's mainly because they've been made before, with more focus and without the distraction of a lazy science-fiction story taking up a lot of time that could have been better spent with such vital material. Kapadia clearly wants to terrify us with 2073, but the movie's odd structure, hasty and incomplete arguments, and sense of familiarity are too confounding for its warnings to really have an impact.

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