If you pay any attention to the news, it is easy to become familiar with the feeling of despair. All too often, headlines go viral about the increasing peril our planet is in. Climate change is a part of our daily lives, especially the conversations about what, if anything, we should do as small, individual people who call Earth our home.
Co-writer/Director Seth Larney is deeply acquainted with this terror, and his film 2067 is his attempt to grapple with these questions: is our demise set in stone? Can one make a difference? Is hope worth it anymore?
The film follows Ethan Whyte (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young man who spends his days in deep tunnels fixing the fragile infrastructure that keeps his city going. Ethan lives in the year 2067, where there are no plants left and humanity struggles to survive by breathing artificial oxygen, which also renders much of the surviving population deeply ill with no cure in sight, including Ethan’s wife. The only hope for the world lies in a secret mission to send someone into the future, where scientists are convinced Earth is recovered and healthy. They’ve received a message from the future, asking for Ethan specifically. He’s now the last hope to find a cure for the widespread sickness and any information on how to rebuild humanity.
Admittedly, parts of the film are rendered more impactful because of our new daily context. People hobble around in strictly enforced masks, a sickness with no cure kills hundreds of thousands, and climate change looms as an ever-present threat. However, the biggest problem at the center of 2067 is that, while it is easy to care about humanity’s survival (after all, that’s us), it is difficult to care about Ethan.
Ethan leaves much to be desired as a protagonist. His default emotion is just tearful screaming, and there is little for us to latch onto as a motivation for his character beyond Batman-esque childhood trauma and a floaty, barely-a-character wife. Unfortunately, the Nolan comparisons don’t stop there. The film in many ways resembles a much more simplified Interstellar in its execution. It’s there in the heavy, over-explanatory dialogue, in the connections between father and child that stretch over space and time, in the way the film hammers into you over and over and over that it is not cold math and science that will save the day, but people and faith and love. There’s even a snarky robot! That wouldn’t be so bad except that, if you have already seen Interstellar, there’s not much mystery or intrigue in where the time travel story will take you.
2067 lacks the heart it is so desperately trying to tell its audience is necessary for our continued survival. The relationship at the core of the film, more than Ethan and his wife, is between Ethan and his surrogate brother Jude. Jude, (Ryan Kwanten), is the better actor of the two, but there is so little to his character that whatever conflict exists between them feels tired and forced. The film is so concerned with telling you that they see each other as family that they even awkwardly call each other “brother,” the misplaced title tacked on at the end of many an emotional outburst.
Larney doesn’t seem to trust his audience to sit with his themes, to turn them over in their heads, and to reach their own conclusions. Everything is spelled out for you in painfully clear ways, all while a bombastic and over-the-top score blares, screaming at you that what you’re watching is important. It’s not that the film is terrible, but rather just frustratingly boring. It can’t seem to find anything new to say, and what it’s repeating has been done better. 2067 is the blandest kind of speculative fiction: it’s more interested in looking and sounding profound rather than taking the time and effort to effectively engage its audience. It is so disconnected from what should be the impact of a story about human survival in spite of the odds, that the optimism it desperately reaches for rings hollow. News headlines do a lot more to stoke the desire to come together and work towards solutions than 2067 can in its entire runtime.
