2067
Directed by Seth Larney
Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ryan Kwanten
Streaming via Netflix
2067 is a dystopian-future, sci-fi, climate change disaster film with enough twists and turns to hold your interest. It succeeds because, while the climate change depicted is alarming, it is a backdrop to a deeper thriller.
Set in an unnamed Australian city, the story basis is that Earth, racked by climate change, has been stripped of all living plants. Oxygen is no longer freely available and must be bought from a huge corporation, but the product itself is causing fatal illness.
A minor corporation employee, Ethan (Kodi Smit-McPhee) finds himself caught in an intrigue centred on a time travel apparatus, which his long dead father was involved in building. He is enticed into being transported deep into the future to try to obtain a solution to the illness afflicting the corporation’s oxygen customers.
So, climate-change-meets-time-travel but then meets a murder mystery as Ethan, hundreds of years in the future alarmingly discovers evidence that he is already dead. As the story uncoils he must also resolve painful mysteries of his childhood.
Interesting ideas are woven throughout the narrative, such as plans by corporate leaders to flee climate change, leaving the rest of humanity to suffer. The contemporary Silicon Valley CEOs hoping to migrate to Mars are the template.
Aficionados of the 1960s TV show, The Time Tunnel will be charmed by the visual reference to the time machine and ethicists will ponder the various moral debates about personal versus social responsibility.
Something missing is any reference to mass action as a solution to the planet’s problems. For that you have to wait for the end credits.
This film was funded through crowd-sourcing and every contributor is named. So, a mass of people were concerned enough about climate change to support this project. Let’s hope they will build the movement that is the real solution to the emergency.