2073

Film Review: a mix of sci-fi and docudrama will leave you speechless

By Alberto Sclaverano

This is one of the most timely and unsettling entertainment products of last year. 2073 is a science fiction film, but it is often constructed and narrated as a documentary, to the point that sometimes it seems to cross the line between sci-fi and mockumentary. It reminds movies

structured as fake but realistic documentaries, like the horror The Bay (2012) or the political thriller Death of a President (2006).

British filmmaker Asif Kapadia has been known for biographical documentary films such as Senna (2010, about moto racing champion Ayrton Senna) and Diego Maradona (2019). 2073 is

his most ambitious, provocative and original movie.

It was first screened out of competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in September 2024 and then released in the UK at the end of the year. The worldwide distribution is still ongoing, and we can only hope it reaches as many countries and moviegoers/VOD spectators as possible.

The voice of Ghost

In 2073 the consequences of unchecked global warming and climate crisis have led to a catastrophic collapse of the Earth’s resources. Global wars fought in the previous decades have also significantly contributed to the degradation of the environment. Millions of people live in extreme poverty in slums-like neighborhoods or are obliged to forced migration. The rich, on the other side, have never been so powerful thanks to advanced technological developments.

Democracy is gone in most of the world, and a new form of “techno-authoritarianism” seems to be the basic government model everywhere. People are put under strict surveillance through

informatics technologies and drones, and political dissent is harshly repressed through violence, sometimes even using robots and AI systems.

The story is told in first person by an unnamed woman identified as “Ghost” (played by actress Samantha Morton). She lives in one of the poorest areas of New San Francisco, the chaotic, violent, and polluted capital of the unified American state that has succeeded the United States. Her voice-over guides the spectators and invites us all to reflect on how this horror could have been stopped.

What follows is a mixture of fiction (set in the 2073 world) and reality, through real images dated back to our times. Ghost has conceived her work as a message for future generations. She wants to keep the memory of the old world, the democratic and not ecologically collapsed America, alive.

She also wants to explain that if different political and economic patterns had been chosen at the beginning of the XXI Century, her nightmarish 2073 present could have been avoided.

The leaders of today

Several prominent leaders of today’s world appear in 2073, from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping. There’s also real footage from an interview with hardliner Brexiter supporter Nigel Farage by American far-right ideologue Steve Bannon. The film was conceived by Kapadia after the Brexit referendum, as a critic of the 2016 English vote, but it then expanded to a general denounce of our whole political landscape.

The dark pattern that began at the end of last decade has only worsened. Now we have reached a point in which all democracies are menaced by the surge of far-right authoritarianism and by new forms of imperialism and military aggressions. This new authoritarianism that seems to spread as much in the West as in countries like Russia and India is often associated with the use of technology to straighten the state’s control, and, especially in the West, to hard climate

change denialism.

With his movie Kapadia launches a desperate cry of alarm to us all. The destroyed 2073 world he describes is the direct legacy of bad choices made during our time. He explicitly told us that if we cannot find a way to relaunch democracy and deal with the climate crisis as humankind, we will enter a dark path. Continuous wars, ecological disasters and a sharp enlargement in the divide between rich and poor will end democracy as we have known it since the end of World

War II. The most distressing, yet spot-on, message of 2073 seems to be that the crisis of democracy and the climate crisis are way more connected than we think. An unlivable environment would almost certainly require authoritarian regimes to maintain order. This is a

nightmare scenario that perhaps we can still avoid.