Asif Kapadia’s new film 2073 is set in a dystopian 2073 where greed and power have destroyed the planet. Released in select theaters on Friday, December 27, 2024, through Neon, it follows an activist who must live underground and is haunted by visions of the past.
Samantha Morton (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2016, The Walking Dead series), Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance with Somebody 2022, Blink Twice 2024), and Hector Hewer (The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself series, Marriage series) star in 2073, inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 experimental film La Jetée, which was about a time traveler trying to change history after a nuclear war.
There are several time jumps in the film where we see how we got to 2073 society through news clips and documentary-style pieces that explore the realities of the real present-day facing authoritarianism, climate change, and inequality and how they may foreshadow a dystopian future. And, yes, most of the newsreels in the movie are real archive footage, phones, and the internet to show how the world has already reached a tipping point and that the current reality is the backstory to a much more horrifying future. These clips feature Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub Ben Rhodes, Rahima Mahmut, Silkie Carlo, Cori Crider, George Monbiot, Nina Schick, Chris Smalls, Douglass Rushkof, Carmody Grey, Tristan Harris, James O’Brien, Anne Applebaum, and Antony Lowenstein as themselves.
Kapadia also includes footage from 2002’s Minority Report, which also starred Morton, which was loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report. The movie tackles the debate of free will vs. determinism. One of the main questions the film raises is whether the future is set or whether free will can alter the future, while 2006’s Children of Men explores the themes of hope and faith in the face of overwhelming futility and despair. The film was based on P. D. James’ novel, 1992’s The Children of Men, which describes what happens when society cannot reproduce, using male infertility to explain this problem. They are used as if they were real events that happened.
Billed as a docufiction, 2073 could be a double feature with 2024’s Civil War, which also deals with a dystopian future and four journalists who travel across the US during a nationwide conflict. While trying to survive, they aim to reach the White House to interview the president before he is overthrown, which also came out last year.
It is scary to think this could be where we are as a society, or lack thereof, in forty-eight years. It is also not lost that both movies came out in an election year. Do they reflect the directors’ views on a particular candidate? One has to wonder.
Morton’s Ghost narrates mostly monotonal to show the boredom of living mostly in solitude and in very little light, so we get a first-person account of the goings-on of the past and current events. She seems to try to be positive, juxtaposed with the bleakness she sees in the news and when she ventures out despite all the cameras. She shows where she lives, which is the, which is horrific (a dead baby at a tide’s edge with an officer looking on) basement of an abandoned mall… claustrophobic-inducing. This makes one think of the mall in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.
Overall, 2073 paints a bleak future…if we are to have any. Most of the time, we watch movies to relax and be entertained for a couple of hours; then, someone who wants to experiment and open their minds to possibilities comes along. Is there an agenda? Sure, but putting that agenda might just make some people think…it only takes one spark. That is why Cryptic Rock gives 2073 4 out of 5 stars.
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