In “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning gut-punch about pop icon Amy Winehouse (and to a lesser extent in biographical docs “Senna” and “Diego Maradona” too), the British director employs an emotional rhythm by which his subject’s tragic end seems foredestined right from the start. Perhaps “2073,” his new hybrid docufiction is a natural expansion of that impulse — a blend of archival footage, CG enhancement and speculative fiction that applies similar retroactive dismay to a cautionary tale about a near-future dystopia, and the current rising tide of everything-is-terrible that may bring it about.
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Unfortunately, what is highly effective as a biographical rise-and-fall tactic is far less so as a means to make a grand statement about imminent societal collapse. It’s not clear quite who is going to be galvanized into action to avert catastrophe when according to “2073,” almost everything that will lead to civilization’s demise — from AI to climate change to technocratic mass-surveillance to anti-democratic authoritarianism to global migration and health crises — has already, hopelessly, happened. The only surprise is that it will apparently still be 50-odd years before the Hydra-headed beast of global breakdown will reduce us all to scavenging in basements beneath abandoned shopping malls while aboveground, drones patrol the ruined, miasma-choked streets of what was once a city.
It is 37 years after “the Event” and Ghost (Samantha Morton, who deserves a more original dystopia than this one) is a scavenger living in a basement beneath an abandoned shopping mall while aboveground, drones patrol the ruined, miasma-choked streets of what was once San Francisco. Near-mute except for a brief encounter with an ex-college professor (Naomie Ackie), Ghost, clutching an unearthed copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” like it’s scripture, speaks to us in voiceover from the bowels of a derelict Bloomingdales so littered and trashed it looks like a TJ Maxx. “It’s too late for me,” she intones gravely, “but maybe it’s not too late for you.” Confusingly, this suggests she knows she’s talking to the past, in a “La Jetee”-style time-travel twist absent “La Jetée”‘s logic. The perspective is further distorted by Ghost’s tale of woe, which is cobbled together from stories she heard from her grandmother, unfurling in a blizzard of clips culled from existing news reports and viral memes, all slathered in Antonio Pinto’s insistently emotive score.
Sometimes the imagery is manipulated: “Chairperson Trump Celebrates 30th Year in Power” reads a chyron on a Times Square-sized LED screen, which in a sour joke is referring to Ivanka (who will be 92 in 2073, by which time it seems a leader’s age is no longer an issue.) But mainly Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni find plenty of material that’s chilling enough without alteration: houses floating away in floods, forest fires, brutal police arrests, riots, Uyghur detention camps and Mark Zuckerberg trying to remember to blink. The same current-day dictators recur in a blur of hatespeak and fearmongering: Modi, Xi, Maduro, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orban, Putin — the gang’s all here. Musk and Thiel, Murdoch and Bezos pop up, as do Priti Patel, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon. But that all these apocalypse-beckoning factors and personalities are fundamentally intertwined is a point barely made by a presentation that is more like a joyless game of disaster whack-a-mole.
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Instead, shouldering the burden of explanation, a bevy of commentators like Rana Ayyub, Carole Cadwalladr and James O’Brien offer their analyses, like so many 2024 Cassandras. In particular, Kapadia leans on the dazzling connect-the-dots persuasiveness of razor-sharp Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, to the point that one wonders why we’re not simply watching Ramona S. Diaz’s “A Thousand Cuts,” which is all about Ressa and covers much the same ground as “2073,” without the distractingly busy framing.
Agitprop is rarely designed to rouse anyone’s rational and decent impulses yet it’s hard to think of a better term to describe Kapadia’s polemical approach. It’s too easy for noble intentions to get lost when there are grievous lapses in judgement like including, against one of the ephedrine spikes of Pinto’s score, the infamous photo of a dead toddler lying face-down in the wet sand of a Greek beach. Or the direct homages to the classic sci-fi canon (the “Blade Runner” Voight-Kampff test cameos) which merely further fictionalize and defang an already cinematically overfamiliar vision of the desolate fate that awaits humankind.
Doomscrolling between reportage and speculation in an effort to both alarm us with fact and awe us with fiction, the film ends up doing neither. Instead it’s an overwhelming dose of whataboutism, that by listing the sheer number of ways in which we’re screwed is more likely to paralyze than to energize a response to any one of them. Emerging depressed from “2073,” it’s hard not to feel like Ghost was wrong, and actually, it is already too late for us as well.
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