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One of 2024’s more stylistically unusual films was 2073 (now streaming on Max), a hybrid documentary/sci-fi film from filmmaker Asif Kapadia. The film is framed as a “warning from the future” incorporating fictional elements – a scavenger played by Samantha Morton in the year 2073 – into traditional archival/interview documentary footage chronicling the rise of global authoritarianism and environmental catastrophe over the last few decades. It’s Kapadia’s first time dabbling in fiction, having made a name for himself as a documentarian with Diego Maradona, Senna and Amy (which won the best-doc Oscar in 2016). It’s also a curious narrative experiment (inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 French short La Jetee) that might be undermining its own dead-serious message.
2073: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Not to be glib, but every second of 2073, fiction or non, is a dour bummer. Consider yourself duly warned. Morton plays a character dubbed Ghost, who lives in a dystopian version of San Francisco in the title year, “37 years after The Event.” She speaks to us via voiceover narration, but chooses to never utter a word to other characters in the film, fearing the institutional punishment that befell her outspoken grandmother, who was disappeared by the government some years prior. Ghost sleeps in a tiny room in the bowels of an abandoned shopping mall, where other fellow scavengers and “off-grid” people live.
Outside, it’s brutal: Orange skies, trash-choked waterways, massive landfills, constant fires. New San Fran is the “capital of the Americas,” and a chyron tells us “Chairwoman Trump” is in her 30th year of power alongside an image of Ivanka Trump, if I’m not mistaken. The rich live in towers that stretch past the cloudline and are filled with nourishing indoor greenhouses and the world’s great art treasures, while everyone else is on the ground amidst a police state with jackboot patrollers on the street and swarms of drones overhead monitoring the citizenry. And then there are the wretched stragglers like Ghost, who dumpster-dive for food and artifacts, scurrying in and out of the light, hoping to avoid capture by the authorities. She uncovers a partially burned copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and clutches it like a treasure.
The first-person dumpster-diving footage doesn’t appear to be fictional – it appears to be real-life found footage, and is a good example of how this film blurs reality with conjecture. As Ghost narrates the story of her and her beloved grandmother, Kapadia segues to scenes from the past 30 years or so, rewinding to key moments in recent history, ranging from the emergence of social media and the growing influence of tech-industry billionaires and anarchic libertarians to the rise of anti-democratic world leaders. We see real-world footage of police brutality, wildfires, war, starvation, pollution, tornadoes, floods; of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Vladimir Putin and other international leaders and influencers perpetuating oppression, division and disharmony. Journalists such as Maria Ressa and Rana Ayyub offer commentary on a variety of topics, including genocide and internment of ethnic groups in India and China, and the weaponization of social media and justice systems. Everything that’s happened here points to a future like the one Ghost lives in, although she states early on, “It may not be too late for you.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: 2073 is like An Inconvenient Truth meets Minority Report meets The Road meets Civil War meets Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness meets a dozen HBO documentaries from the last decade.
Performance Worth Watching: Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize winning Filipino and American journalist, shares some potent commentary, and is quietly inspiring in her attempts to hold power to account. (She also was the subject of a 2020 Frontline documentary, A Thousand Cuts.)
Memorable Dialogue: Ressa looks at the current state of everything in the world, and delivers the film’s thesis: “Isn’t this a science fiction movie?”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: It seems that Kapadia gives us a little less than 50 years before humanity needs to pull the plug on its own life support. 2073 somewhat gracelessly shoehorns speculative fiction into a supercut of all the major societal ills of the 21st century, and the result is as heavy-handed as you’d expect. But it’s more depressing than informative or motivating. It’s also conceptually confused, Kapadia blurring fiction into reality in a manner that illustrates the point he’s attempting to illuminate – that what we consider to be the unreal stuff of sci-fi is indeed real, and we may already be through the looking glass – but ultimately weakens his argument. We’re left wondering if first-person footage of dumpster scavenging, or images of children frying and eating live centipedes, or shots of environmental devastation, are “real” footage or staged and enhanced with CG graphics.
There’s something to be said about fudging reality for the sake of deeper insight, a la Herzog’s documentarian pursuits of “the ecstatic truth.” But that tack makes more sense in a philosophical context than in the ruthless pragmatism of 2073. Urging the masses to take heed demands greater clarity and at least a shred of optimism, which the film struggles (the former) or outright fails (the latter) to achieve. Being distracted by Kapadia’s sourcing and methodology might be welcome, considering the hopeless tone he nurtures for the 85-minute run time.
The general idea here is likely to hook the viewer with the familiar stuff of many dystopian movies – Ghost’s forays into hazy memories of the past and excursions into abandoned and crumbling corners of civilization – and tie it to the biggest neo-historical events of the 21st century. It feels stapled together, disturbing archival footage wedged into repetitive scenes of Ghost brooding in her hiding place or ducking out of the light, or briefly interacting with a former professor played by Naomi Ackie, who gets one scene, and a friendly fellow scavenger named Jack (Hector Hewer). “He’s got these goofy puppy dog eyes. He’s an AI,” Ghost narrates, absolutely assuring us that his smile, a rare instance of potential uplift in the entire film, is not to be trusted. Everyone, even the nonfictional people, speaks in dire slogans over upsetting imagery. “People thought the world would end. But the world goes on. It’s us who will end,” is one of the last statements Ghosts utters, and it feels more like a eulogy than a warning.
Our Call: 2073 doesn’t rise above the level of “interesting” in its narrative and visual approach – and its bleakness is likely to drag you into despair. If you have to see what it’s all about, I suggest chasing with a palate cleanser, maybe Tommy Boy or The Naked Gun. Otherwise, I say SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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