The future looked quite bleak even before the events of last week, but now Asif Kapadia’s speculative hybrid feature 2073 feels all the more relevant following the disastrous American election. Following its Venice Film Festival premiere, the Samatha Morton-led project will arrive on December 27 and now the new trailer has been unveiled from NEON.
Here’s the synopsis: “It’s the year 2073, and the worst fears of modern life have been realized. Surveillance drones fill the burnt orange skies and militarized police roam the wrecked streets, while survivors hide away underground, struggling to remember a free and hopeful existence. In this ingenious mixture of visionary science fiction and speculative nonfiction, Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy) transports us to a future foreshadowed by the terrifying realities of our present moment. Two-time Academy Award® nominee Samantha Morton (In America, Sweet and Lowdown, Minority Report) plays a survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past—a past that happens to be our present, visualized through contemporary footage interconnecting today’s global crises of authoritarianism, unchecked big tech, inequality, and global climate change. 2073 is an urgent, unshakable vision of a dystopic future that could very well be our own.”
Luke Hicks said in his review, “The footage of the future Kapadia imagines is so derivative of post-apocalyptic cinema (Demolition Man, Wall-E, Blade Runner 2049 seem to be primary influences) that it fails to envision anything at all. 2073 doesn’t shy away from that level of influence. Early on, the Danny Huston dinner scenes from Children of Men play as part of the scene-setting montage, as do shots of Morton as “precog” in Minority Report later on––but it could’ve used another good long look in the mirror before it landed on its futuristic aesthetic and loose narrative.”
