2073 – first-look review

Asif Kapadia’s 2073 is billed as both sci-fi dystopia and doc­u­men­tary, a cat­e­gori­sa­tion that seems – at first – para­dox­i­cal. It begins in a decid­ed­ly fic­tion­al man­ner, as a grime-smeared Saman­tha Mor­ton – known only as Ghost – silent­ly trawls the rav­ages of an apoc­a­lyp­tic waste­land. Skele­tal trees are burn­ing, mounds of rub­bish choke the rivers, and cities glow an eerie orange beneath chem­i­cal clouds and the buzz of drones. Some­thing has clear­ly gone hor­ri­bly, ter­ri­fy­ing­ly awry: an event hap­pened 37 years ago, Ghost tells us in voiceover, and this author­i­tar­i­an apoc­a­lypse is the result. Cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe, sur­veil­lance and state vio­lence are now inex­tri­ca­bly tan­gled together.

And then sud­den­ly, the gears of the film shift, and the years flick back on screen to our recent past and inescapable present, con­struct­ing step by step how this dystopia came to unfold, and how it began soon­er than we might believe. This is the doc­u­men­tary half of 2073, unpack­ing our cur­rent polit­i­cal night­mare through four dis­tinct strands – the sup­pres­sion of a free media, tech­no­fas­cism, hyper­cap­i­tal­ism and cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe – inter­spersed with the lega­cy that Ghost has inher­it­ed from their fallout.

To say 2073 is a bleak film would be both an under­state­ment and a reduc­tion of Kapadia’s ambi­tious project. Cer­tain­ly, the film is uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly, unre­lent­ing­ly furi­ous, as it remorse­less­ly holds to light the count­less dystopias we cur­rent­ly live under and tol­er­ate: the elec­tion fraud of the Brex­it ref­er­en­dum that paved the way for fas­cist migrant poli­cies, the har­vest­ing of bio­da­ta that enables the ongo­ing geno­cide of Uyghur Mus­lims, the minute track­ing of Ama­zon employ­ees to foren­si­cal­ly con­trol labour to name but a few. This anger is chan­nelled and pro­nounced through edi­tors Chris King and Sylvie Landra’s fre­net­ic pace and jar­ring cuts, and if at times 2073’s doc­u­men­tary seg­ments give way to some of the more brash didac­ti­cism of an Adam McK­ay film, it hard­ly feels unearned giv­en the hor­rors we bear wit­ness to.

Per­haps these hor­rors will be new to some, but there isn’t much Kapa­dia cov­ers that hasn’t been said before in var­i­ous ways; although there is a crisp artic­u­late­ness to the inter­vie­wees he selects – George Mon­biot and Maria Ressa amongst them – and a scope to the way he inter­sects these var­i­ous pres­sure points of oppres­sion that builds a com­pelling­ly broad pic­ture. There is the argu­ment to be made, if any­thing, that the film’s own pol­i­tics are a lit­tle ten­u­ous; it is strange­ly fix­at­ed on main­tain­ing the integri­ties of the nation-state for a film so inter­est­ed in its vio­lence and failures.

Yet there is some­thing mon­u­men­tal­ly pow­er­ful in its bring­ing togeth­er of these two gen­res, and in the way that Kapa­dia plays with their expect­ed and pre­con­ceived tem­po­ral­i­ties. Dystopia is a genre obsessed with the imag­i­na­tion of a future; doc­u­men­tary with the archival of the past. In 2073, Kapa­dia dis­rupts this lin­ear­i­ty in star­tling ways. There is no sin­gu­lar event, he tells us, no before or after. The future has already tak­en place – we have been liv­ing in it for a long time.