Starring Samantha Morton

Directed by Asif Kapadia

Neon/Film4

Samantha Morton mopes around a totalitarian future San Francisco while a documentary tells us the world is doomed… doomed, I tell you!!!!!

‘Hey A.I., make me a documentary in the style of Adam Curtis – you know, lots of clips of random terrible things cut together without any context – but can you intercut it with shots of Samantha Morton looking miserable, like she did when she played the “precog” in Minority Report.’

I’m a huge fan of director Asif Kapadia. His documentaries about Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona are masterclasses in narrative biographical verité, which makes 2073 all the stranger. The irony is, as I suggest, 2073 feels for much of its annoying 85 minutes that it could have been put together by an A.I. – albeit an A.I. programmed by a stoned student in the middle of an existential crisis, rifling through the kitchen cupboards for some tin foil to wrap around his head so that ‘THEY!’ can’t zap his mind. This is an irony because one of Kapadia’s main fears is that we are in the process of succumbing to totalitarian AI. If you can’t beat ’em…

That’s not the only irony. I spend plenty of time worrying about the state of the world – the climate, the threats to democracy, we all know the list – but films like this make me want to smash my own head against a paving stone. This is skull-crushingly dunderheaded stuff. Kapadia wangs on about totalitarianism but does so by employing the exact same logic so favoured by the totalitarians he claims to be warning us of. Take a set of broadly true things and assemble them in a simplistic fashion, devoid of any context whatsoever to inspire rage in the viewer – or in my case, irritation. Heat rather than light. No wonder the planet’s burning.

And after what is, in effect, an 85 minute TikTok Video of Doom’s Greatest Hits, what is Kapadia’s thesis? As far as I could make out, what he’s saying is that the world is controlled by ‘THEM’, democracy is dead, and we’re all screwed.

Now, it may be that the last of those is true, but the minute anyone starts talking about ‘Them’ you know they’ve been spending too much time on social media. Could it possibly be that ‘they’ are the millions of voters who just gave Trump a popular majority or who are turning to far right parties all over the world and electing them democratically? Is it possible that democracy is very much alive, it just isn’t behaving in the way Kapadia wants it to? No, I think that kind of political nuance is beyond this bone-headed film. Sure, there are tech-bros and financiers who want to screw the planet for their own ends, but there’s also my liberal green friends chiding me for not buying a Tesla and helping to make Elon Musk even richer. Kapadia doesn’t go there because his brand of polemic doesn’t do the kinds of contradiction that are fundamental to understanding reality.

The world is a complex place, and the idea that the reason we’re in trouble is down to a few shadowy billionaires versus the honest masses is simplistic tripe. When the movie appears to blame Chinese state persecution of Uyghurs on American policy in the Middle East you know you’ve entered some kind of weird parallel universe and it’s hard to take anything this movie says seriously – even the serious stuff.

Verdict: 2073 is essentially like asking Siri what’s wrong with the world after setting the A.I.’s algorithms to Private Frazer from Dad’s Army – and intercutting it with Samantha Morton. We’re only going to feel truly depressed if we can see Samantha wringing her hands from the other side of the apocalypse. 1/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com