Politicians often invoke the idea of children or future generations when urging the importance of collective action with consequences that only emerge in the long term. Humans can show tremendous capacity as a species when facing a tragedy that stares them in the face. When needing to make immediate painful sacrifices to stave off those calamities, our capacity for relative empathy tends to shrivel. Oscar-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia arrives with a radical solution to this problem faced by a world in crisis. His dystopian docudrama “2073” operates from the proposition that the crises that will plunge the globe into a bleak, uninhabitable hellscape are not on the precipice of occurring. By his estimation, they’ve already happened.
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Kapadia asks his audience to reframe their understanding of the present as something other than a standard, neutral canvas for everyday life. Instead, his subversive take on speculative (non)-fiction presents the global catastrophes of today as someone else’s past tense. By casting ever-evolving contemporary conflicts through a retrospective glance, he offers a chilling new way to reconsider the ramifications of continuing on the current trajectory.
“2073” personifies the reaping of what 2024 sows in Samantha Morton’s Ghost, a woman trying to survive the rubble of what’s known as New San Francisco. Kapadia throws in a few flourishes of pure imagination, such as a needling newscast briefly showing that “Chairwoman” Ivanka Trump has just entered her third decade in power. She also provides a tour of how technology might advance in a half-century by interacting with a lifelike humanoid AI who proves to her that “you can’t trust anyone anymore.”
But the most frightening footage is not any creation of Kapadia’s. The exterior footage of the Bay Area is not some CGI creation but actual footage of the notorious 2020 Orange Skies Day. When she witnesses state violence against civilians, he intercuts real videos of police brutality. “The Event,” an apocalyptic occurrence that doomed her to a fate of gleaning in the rubble of an American metropolis, might have taken place 37 years prior. However, the playback is instantly recognizable as past disasters when “2073” grants glimpses of “The Event” to the audience.
The message is loud, clear, and sadly necessary. Maybe envisioning the existing climate of corruption, violence, and environmental destruction as happening to someone else at a later time is the best way for some to grasp the full extent of its craziness. And just in case it isn’t, Kapadia cuts into Morton’s miserable existence of subsistence with interludes of archival footage from the present day. “2073” draws from an impressive coterie of journalists and talking heads, ranging from Filipina crusader Maria Ressa to Obama foreign policy architect Ben Rhodes, to explain the forces driving the world into darkness.
The film has a clear-eyed and thorough view of the global community’s challenges. Using narrated mini-documentaries interspersed in Ghost’s story, “2073” spans everything from the resurgence of an authoritarian right wing to unaccountable billionaire tech overlords and even chilling advances in AI – with climate change undergirding it all. Developments once dismissed as inconceivable are no longer the realm of science fiction; in fact, they happen frequently. Ressa even goes a step further, postulating that 2024 is already a science fiction world, given the erosion of individual will at the convergence of these nefarious actors.
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This assessment is grim and pessimistic. And yet, it’s neither hopeful nor hopeless for the future. Kapadia’s film is an undyingly earnest plea to recognize the world off the screen as the one in real peril. Because technology has dissolved any sense of shared societal truth, he uses “2073” to create an artistic construct in which viewers see their worst fears reflected and validated.
Sure, Morton’s Ghost and Naomi Ackie’s Professor are purely functional creations who serve as little more than warning posts for the world’s dangerous current trajectory. These flimsy figments of Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni’s minds serve their purpose of humanizing an abstract concept – and do little else. “It may not be too late for you,” Ghost’s note from the future pleads to present-day viewers. “2073” might sacrifice some eloquence to make its creative points, but the sincerity shines poignantly and powerfully. Let it be a galvanizing call to action. [B+]
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