James Y. Lee
It would be worth reviewing Asif Kapadia’s 2073 under regular conditions if there was anything of insight or substance here to meaningfully review. This tactlessly bizarre, self-indulgently “prophetic,” dystopian-sci-fi and documentary Frankenstein of a film is so utterly empty and facile that it provokes no real thought in the first place, only exhaustion and idle despair. As a documentary, it tries to appeal to an already overstimulated, deeply tired, and profoundly overwhelmed generation of modern people by reminding them of the same things they already know are causing the decline of the world as we know it. To make matters even more baffling, Kapadia’s film then proceeds to hypothesize about its titular future 49 years later, where, as a result of all the bleak modern developments it lists with self-important bravado, America has descended into a fascist police state with Ivanka Trump in her 30th year of rule, its horrors consolidated into the completely aimless tale of a woman named Ghost (Samantha Morton) wandering the streets of… New San Francisco? (Come on, now.) The catalyst for this complete annihilation of democracy is dubbed an indistinct “Event” that occurs specifically in 2036—a point of no return that allows America to plunge into authoritarianism forever. Anyone even slightly familiar with the glut of juvenile young-adult dystopian “romances” that dominated the literary landscape of the 2010s will likely be immediately rolling their eyes, then bracing themselves for the further embarrassment about to ensue.
Very simply put, 2073 embodies the laziest abattoir of “enlightenment” oriented documentary filmmaking. It’s the kind of film that lobs a litany of despairing social phenomena at an audience it presumes to be asleep and unsuspecting, then provides no guidelines for even the beginnings of a way out, precisely because it is too unimaginative to provide any kind of narrative outside of the scattershot depictions of totalitarianism that it predicts will end democracy as we know it. Below is a nearly-exhaustive list of ideas and concepts that this film lobs at you with bold, green, overlaid text highlighting key ideas from its interview subjects, as if it needs every potential cinematic trick in the book to impress upon an audience how important and revolutionary these things are to question:
- Tech billionaires and their financial, free-agent, libertarian dominance over government influence, as well as their ambitions to venture into space due to their intentions of burning Earth down to ash and wasting all the resources it has!
- The rise of authoritarian and fascist governments worldwide, who are allying with each other to demolish the Pax Americana, are intent on suppressing the freedom of speech and press, and are using populist appeals to bigotry and xenophobia in order to build their platforms off of misinformation!
- Speaking of misinformation, did you know that social media companies have been collecting every ounce of data on every user registered on their platforms? How about the fact that the technology associated with these platforms are also being used for the purposes of surveillance, and reinforcing authoritarian rule?
These three key umbrellas represent the broad strokes of the appeals to action that 2073 wants to spur—and they immediately beg the question of what kind of audience could this film possibly want to reach. Anyone even remotely familiar with Kapadia’s name as a documentarian, with Neon as a distributor, and so on as it pertains to the creation and release of this film, is likely cinematically and socially conscious enough to know about all of these developments in the first place—likely because they’ve been relayed before through more cleverly presented means. But the more incuriously minded audiences, the “asleep” citizens that this film seems to want to appeal to, will likely have no real interest in a film such as this. The best gambit 2073 has going for it on that front is that its science-fiction conceit could serve as a marketing dupe to bait people into watching a series of documented insights about the bleakness of the modern world, but is an 85-minute long deluge of that level of real-world despair, laden with gallingly edited footage of corpses left behind by brutalizing authoritarian violence, actually going to spur anyone into meaningful action?
Even looking back at recent releases, Alex Garland’s Civil War and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up are immediate, controversial examples of films that respectively hypothesized about a bleak American future or the demise of an oblivious world at the hands of climate change’s obvious encroachment, but at least those films were able to provide engaging narratives to offset the blunt nature of their respective commentaries. With 2073, its best idea of framing its polemic is to literally frame the journalists Kapadia interviewed—ranging from Filipina investigator Maria Ressa and Indian columnist Rana Ayyub—with a science-fiction-display overlay so aesthetically juvenile it befits the immaturity of how it ties the courage of their insights and investigative work over the past several years to the most derivative cinematic portrayal of a dystopian America of recent memory.
Therein lies the true insult of 2073. Its attempts at spurring people into action are totally undercut by the fact that it can barely identify its own audience, it cannot make its science-fiction meaningfully and appropriately coexist with its nonfiction, and by the fact that its overwhelming torrent of powerlessness and despair makes it virtually impossible to want to get up and resist. Perhaps most despairing of all is the fact that, with a little over twenty days remaining until the inauguration of Donald Trump, the hypothetical future that 2073 posits no longer serves as a warning, but more closely resembles an omen of things to come. Dear reader, I speak with incredible exhaustion—and also for the vast majority of my peers, contemporaries, and friends—when I confidently say that absolutely no one who’s been remotely aware of the depressive societal despair of the world we live in wants to be reminded yet again of what’s coming now, especially not in a fashion as tactlessly, brutishly self-important, despairing and condescending as this. I personally cannot parse out the slightest clue as who this film is for, and have no interest in keeping my eyes on it long enough to find out. I no longer want to see artists lecturing others about the darkness of the world, with no interest in also showing them the light.
