Asif Kapadia––the biographical documentary wiz behind contemporary classics like Senna and Amy––opens his semi-fictional film 2073 in a flurry of doc footage. Wildfires, floods, and other such natural disasters set the tone while disturbing clips of cops bashing skulls and riot police brutalizing innocent people cement it for the next 85 minutes. Then comes the fiction: it’s been 37 years since “The Event,” and we’re in the future: the year 2073.
Thinly conceived sociopolitical dystopian circumstances crash across the screen in a somewhat thrilling, somewhat unintentionally funny (e.g. “Chairwoman Trump Celebrates 30th Year in Power”) newsreel continuation of the montage that ultimately sets up the thematic narrative advertised by the title and presence of Samantha Morton in-character in a documentary. We’re in New San Francisco, the capital of the United States in 2073, which resembles a very familiar dystopia.
We don’t know what “The Event” was that led them here, per se, but one doesn’t need stretch their imagination too far these days to conceive of a recognizable moment of global societal collapse. Morton wanders around the sepia New San Francisco wasteland. A hushed voiceover talks about societal regrets, things that could’ve gone differently, how “no one did anything to stop them.” Then, the clock rewinds, the film shifts gears back to documentary, and we see one of the many real things either currently underway or within the past 25 years that led them here.
At its core, and at its most interesting, 2073 is a fiery, dot-connecting documentary on a number of crushing political, technological, and environmental forces seriously threatening humanity. It’s about the rise of stubborn, violent, populist authoritarian-style leaders who fight to stay in power above all else: Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping in China, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump. It’s about systemic, publicly-acknowledged, legally-defended violence toward massive groups of people like Uyghurs and Sunni Muslims.
It’s about China’s selling of autonomy-suffocating surveillance tech to India, Israel, Ecuador, and God knows who else. It’s about un-elected men in power who decide more and more what the restrictions and allowances of our universe will be. Men like Mark Zuckerburg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. It’s about the commodification of our attention and the data-fication of our identities, which lose their humanity as they become a mere number in the datastream.
Yet, in all of this, the aimless fiction spliced in severely damages the project, always interrupting something worthwhile to belabor the same point. The preachy tone betrays the film, giving it a seedy, conspiratorial feel when there is nothing conspiratorial about it all––just plain, simple, broad, and necessary economic and political facts. There is a great documentary in there somewhere, one that understands that potential and, thus, its fiction differently.
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.
2073‘s official premise cites Chris Marker’s La Jetée as its primary influence, but Marker’s groundbreaking short is nowhere to be found in the DNA. The same premise (half of which is devoted to the 1963 French short) mis-explains in one sentence that La Jetée is about “a time-traveler who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity.” In actuality, La Jetée is about a man who falls fatally in love with a woman in the past after he is kidnapped in the future, tortured, and used as a guinea pig for time travel experiments, no will or heroism involved whatsoever. It’s a glaring display of Kapadia’s rose-colored vision of his film and those that inspired it.
When we leave the fiction, Kapadia show-stops as a documentarian. The web of connections he weaves between villainous governments, mass human-rights violations, global-surveillance developments, titans of tech, and the like is not only attention-grabbing and informative but genuinely action-inspiring. What doesn’t inspire action, however, is the finger-wagging that follows, primarily in the form of the fiction, as if the corrupt people and systems in Kapadia’s crosshairs don’t act primarily without public approval or upstream against well-organized opposition.
One of the many finely-spun threads of the filmmaker’s doc is the depiction of how said leaders and systems take destructive action despite a fiercely active and oppositional majority, publicly and politically, acting outside any average citizen’s ability to affect them. The warning refrain (“No one did anything to stop them”) ends up playing like a patronizing plea to recalcitrant children instead of a critical conversation-starter for mature, remotely intelligent adults.
One can’t help but wonder how Kapadia doesn’t recognize that 2073 is now: that 2024––the real version of the modern dystopia he warns about––is a much more recognizable dismal future than the Hollywood-coded apocalyptic wasteland he creates to signal one. A more gripping, relatable, honest, creative, and considered version of the fiction would take place in a San Francisco that looks almost exactly like today’s, with the same spirit of global oppression realized.
The Max Richter-influenced score has been tired for well over a decade, ever since the style’s mass adoption into TV, film, and advertising. That’s not to say someone can’t find good use of it today, but this feels like the most worn-out iteration, the commercial version trying to sell you something (even if it’s for a good cause).
There’s no reason why a great documentary filmmaker who’s focused nearly his whole career on biographical pieces shouldn’t switch to something new and less-defined. It’s exciting, actually. But it’s also no surprise when it doesn’t really work out. The documentary elements are fantastic; then we have to return to 2073, a time and place that simply lacks the story, conception, cinematography, and funding needed to make it work.
2073 premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and will be released by NEON.