Senna and Amy filmmaker Asif Kapadia turns to dystopian filmmaking with 2073, starring Samantha Morton. Here’s our review:
Best known for his award-winning documentaries Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona, director Asif Kapadia has made something quite different with 2073 – a feature that blends dystopian fiction with archive footage to deliver a stark warning about humanity’s present course.
Samantha Morton provides a haunted-looking focal point as Ghost, a denizen of the dystopian New San Francisco in the titular year 2073. Although remaining silent in the film itself, Morton provides a soulful voiceover as Kapadia cuts from footage of her scrambling around the remains of a department store – her refuge from the militarised state patrolling the rest of the city – and sequences that show what led to our planet’s collapse.
Kapadia has previously said he was inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetee when he made 2073, though in practice its tone feels more like the decaying futurism of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker fused with the poetic tone of Terrence Malick. Kapadia uses a mixture of news footage and other clips to create a montage of what an ecological and societal disaster might look like; Morton’s voiceover is joined by such journalists as George Monbiot and Carole Cadwalladr, whose contributions are used to describe how developments in our recent past – the rise of AI, fake news, libertarian tech bros, the populist odour of Nigel Farage – could ultimately contribute to our collective demise.
It’s an undoubtedly personal film, echoing Franny Armstrong’s similarly-themed The Age Of Stupid (2009), in which Pete Postlethwaite starred and narrated a docu-drama about environmental oblivion. There’s little in the way of drama or human interaction – Naomi Ackie joins Morton in one scene that provides a welcome shot of warmth, but is never seen again – but as a mood piece, it certainly has its own disturbing power. Kapadia’s stitching together of footage isn’t always seamless – in one sequence, we see Morton reacting to a moment of police brutality, evidently shot in the Middle East, before she looks up at a glimmering tower block located on an entirely different continent.
What Kapadia demonstrates, though, is that footage taken by news crews and even ordinary citizens with their dashcams is as powerful as anything made by Hollywood filmmakers and their armies of digital effects wizards. Shots of shattered buildings, the wiry remains of forests, burned by wildfires, or flooded city streets all have a powerful cumulative impact, especially when cut together by a filmmaker as skilled as Kapadia. (Though it’s debatable whether some shots – particularly of war victims or a now infamously heart-breaking image of a child refugee lying on a beach – should have been used in what is largely a work of fiction.)
That imagery is in service to a narrative that will be familiar to those keeping up with recent events. Billionaires, particularly those in the tech sector, have used their might to hoover up ever more wealth, to the point where major corporations now have more power than nation states. At some point in the near future, Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni predict, the surveillance technology used by China to repress its citizens, in particular ethnic groups like Uyghurs, will have gone global. Eventually, the United States will have its own social credit system, with its populace relentlessly tracked and categorised according to how much of a threat they pose to the status quo. Anyone deemed ‘suspicious’ is rounded up and carted off for an unknown – but probably grim – fate.
Meanwhile, our ecological doom will be hastened by societal division, sown in large part by tech companies, Russian-backed bot armies and populist demagogues. Throw in the advent of deepfakes and AI-generated imagery, and you’re left with an entire generation arguing over what is real and what is fantasy – essentially we’re all fiddling with our phones while the entire planet burns.
It’s a valid argument, and compellingly put by 2073; the problem, arguably, is that it’s preaching to the converted. Those who read George Monbiot’s warnings about the climate emergency will nod along to Kapadia’s dystopia; anyone who’s followed Carole Cadwalladr’s ballsy journalism will know that she’s been talking about Silicon Valley’s danger to democracy for years.
Those who aren’t of that persuasion – the very people who need to see it most – will likely dismiss 2073 as alarmism, or even more regrettably, won’t watch it at all.
2073 is screening at the London Film Festival on the 16th and 18th October. Both are unfortunately sold out.
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