The year is 2073 and in a post-apocalyptic world a survivor of a climate catastrophe ekes out a meagre existence in New SanFrancisco, a colony of survivors in a world divided into the billionaire class and the rest. Cities are shattered, settlements are flooded. Unlucky non-billionaires like Ghost (Samantha Morton) scurry about in the wreckage, like something out of I Am Legend. Living in the shoe section of an old department store, she makes daily forays into the dangerous outside world to scavenge canned goods while trying to avoid being pounced on by gangs of marauding law enforcement officers.
How did we get here? In cracked voiceover, the otherwise mute Ghost explains as director Asif Kapadia dissolves from the future into the past and from fiction into fact. In classic talking-head-and-archive documentary style Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni unburden themselves of their thoughts. The blame for the upcoming apocalypse, to their way of thinking, can be laid at the door of the Trump dynasty, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and all the other transglobal oligarchs, 9/11 and the War Against Terror, Palantir, the harvesting of biometric data, non-stop surveillance by drone and camera, facial recognition software, AI and the weaponisation of social media. Coming soon: the further despoliation of the rainforest, more displacement of indigenous peoples, hurricanes, tsunamis and eventually climate collapse. It’s a familiar list of malefactors and outcomes. Somehow Palestine and the Israelis are also on the list, as are the Uyghurs in China, even though they don’t really fit the initial, climate-apocalypse thesis.
Realising that this might all be getting a bit heavy, for light entertainment Kapadia and Grisoni periodically whisk us back to the cataclysmic future, where Ghost lives like a rat scuttling from place to place, before they drag us back to our present again to push our noses back into today’s political scene. Here, campaigners like George Monbiot, Carole Cadwalladr and Maria Ressa warn us that our own futures are being stolen from under our noses by faceless grinches who no longer – on account of their vast wealth – have any skin in the humanity game.
Cut to shots of devastating weather events. Collapsing bridges. Massive dust storms. Lives swept away.
If we’ve learned anything over the past few decades it’s that climate catastrophism doesn’t work. Resistance to the transition to a greener, carbon-neutral world is faltering in spite of repeated re-assertions of all sorts of disaster scenarios by the people who know most about these things. Doom awaits if we don’t turn off the oil, start sequestering carbon dioxide and abandon stranded hydrocarbon assets, they keep telling us. Why isn’t their message being listened to? Because shady forces are working to counter it, partly, but also because doom is a turn-off. People run better on hope than despair.
Kapadia, director of landmark documentaries such as Senna and Amy, seems not to have got the memo and in 2073 he tries one more time what’s been tried many times before… and failed. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results…
So, Kapadia tells us, we’re staring down the barrel of a world of the survival of the richest. Put another way we’re going to hell in a handcart. What to do about it? Who knows? None of the journalists, writers and campaigners interviewed seem to have much of a plan. Why should they? Reporting what’s going on is their job and knowledge is a prerequisite to action, to be positive for a moment.
This is a noble movie with fine intentions. As a member of the cucktard wokerati who wakes up every morning wondering how I can make the world weaker and worse I broadly go along with most of its sentiments. But, doomsterism doesn’t work. And tackling large and complex problems using social-media soundbites – which is all the time that the Uyghurs, for instance, are given – is to shortchange them. More in-depth analysis required.
2073 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
