Asif Kapadia captures the very essence of pop sensation Amy Winehouse in his Oscar winning film, ‘Amy,’ and he creates in this film the sense of rhythm through the emotions of his audience, which makes it look as if the story being narrated always had a dark ending towards the beginning. His latest film in his catalogue, ‘2073’ is a remarkable display of this impulse where is uses a combination of historical, fantasy and futuristic isolating footage angles and uses this to portray the terrors that could arrive in the future, as well as, the terrors of the modern world.
The techniques utilized in the making of ‘2073’ about artificial intelligence and global warming create a dystopia in the film where audiences feel as if there is a warfare in every corner of the world. However, depicting such a dystopian world where an axe is continually hanging above everyone’s head serves as a poor storytelling method to explain how society is about to collapse. Because it is ‘2073,’ there is a sense of feeling where you can guess the answer as to what caused civilization’s demise as almost the most pathetic version of that scenario played out already and that was always expected.
The only disappointment about the future predicted is that it is now a reality that massive global disorder and chaos will transform our civilization to ashes and the remnants of humanity will be scavengers living beneath shopping centers.
It’s been thirty seven years after the happenings of ‘the Event’, Ghost(Samantha Morton) is a scavenger living under an abandoned shopping mall while machines survey the landscape. Viewing the industrial fog covered San Francisco City through her dirty windows, Ghost has strong usage of words when referring to sculpted structures inhabited by life seeing as they are now barren and empty. She is further in a chaotic scene holding a beat up version of an autobiography and wearing a hearst Target bra with many old clothes draped around her. Mysteriously, this type of perspective strengthened by her surroundings is not just normal to her but actually reaffirming to her, in a more dystopian narrative pushed by psychiatric trauma.
The position is not of much help either, especially after Ghost recalls how her grandmother would tell her an unfinished story which quickly segues into a montage of news footage and memes thanks to Antonio Pinto’s unrestrained music: however, not much coherence is found in this woman’s life, as she is not much of a woman.
As it stands, some images are not quite real: “Chairperson Trump Celebrates 30th Year in Power”, declares a message on a large digital screen. It’s dark humor since Ivanka will be 92 in 2073 and one hopes that age will no longer be a factor when appointing leaders. Kapadia and cowriter Tony Grisoni, however, manage to find many disturbing images which need no modification; The implosion of the World Trade Center, cyclone Katrina, the LA riots, the Tiananmen protests, Guantanamo bay torture, and Zuckerberg trying to recall to blink. The same contemporary dictators reappear from a nebulous empire built of hate filled propaganda: Modi, Xi, Maduro, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orban, Putin: Yes, all are here. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, Bezos, Priti Patel, Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon the list continues. Any hope of comprehending these apocalypse inviting events or personalities parallel with pleasure such as a silly whack a mole game are only minimally outlined in the presentation.
As a result, it is the witness where it begins, so the likes of Rana Ayyub, Carole Cadwalladr and James O’ Brien offer their interpretations as though they a looking at the 2024 world that will be. In particular, Kapadia seems to take fillip of astonishing connect the dots style of Filipina journalist Maria Ressa when in fact it raises the question as to why there’s not just ‘A Thousand Cuts’, which does much the same plot as ‘2073’ but without meta framing in which there are hectic struggles that detract the attention.
It is the intention of creating those kinds of feelings that others call anger propaganda often propagates but it is difficult to think of anything better as a descriptor of Kapadia’s politicised techniques. Good causes become collateral damage where there have been deplorable misjudgments, for instance using the image of a toddler face down in the wet sand scooped up from a Greek beach, as an interlude between sequences comprising the ephedrine spikes cut of Pinto’s score was in poor taste. Or direct references to the original science fiction genre (the Blade Runner Voight Kampff test scenes) which only serve to make more gaudy and neutralize a vision more than people have already been subjected to on film.
Traveling through substances that hover between accounting for real events and imagination in an attempt both to scandalize us by some truths and to impress us with the invented picture, the end of the film is just not capable of doing either.
Instead it’s an illogical retort that changes the form of an argument, that by detailing the countless ways we’re screwed is more likely to dishearten than to motivate a response to any one of them. After coming disillusioned from “2073,” one cannot help but agree with Ghost, it is probably already too late for everyone else too.
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