j* Movie Reviews 2019

2040 (2019)

This sweet, hopeful imagining comes to you from the mind of the guy that made That Sugar Film, and perhaps it's a bit more sacharine?

Possibly my favourite thing about this was the scene at candy bar of The Star before. Young couple ask for the chai, in takeaway cups. Bar guy is all "You're going to see 2040, I'm giving you a mug." Word up walking the talk. Which really, is the biggest problem we face... to much talking not enough walking.

So we all know there's a lot of doom and gloomer films out there. Ecological-grief has kind of become the new hot genre, taking the place of the oldschool church sermon where the sinners are lectured from the pulpits. We feel bad about the plastic in the ocean, the shark finning, the destruction of this place, the death of orangutans, the melting ice, the dying possums... any number of issues. We watch the films, feel bad, post about it, stop eating fish, donate to some fund, or whatever and then generally move on.

This film decides it's going to try and be a little different and bring some hope. And I guess it does. It intercuts the main guys young daughter with her imagined older self as she exists in the world of 2040. It's kinda like sci-fi world building, and maybe about as deep? He selects technologies and theories with the promise of change and extrapolates them out to neatly fix everything wrong with our planet. Lesser till agriculture, driverless cars, reclaimed parking, networked sustainable electricity, urban farms, educated women lowering the population across the globe. All prototypes, all imagined existing as dominant twenty years from now. Just like in sci-fi I felt there was a reasonable amount of handwavium going on here... some of the more tricksy details of some things were kind of just glossed over, or at least super-simplified for a general audience.

There was this weird economic doughnut thing, and maybe it was just in the visualisation of it but it seemed a bit odd. I was never sure if it was meant to be turning into a bun or not, but then it never did, and I got the distinct impression it was quite sugary. And more healthy people in this doughnut strangely required more hospitals and there were a few other quirks like that. I'm down with cradle-to-cradle and circular economies, but this didn't seem to quite come together as coherently as I would have liked.

I guess it's an alright starter kit for sustainable technologies if you're not up with them generally. But I want my driverless share car NOW, dangit.

J* gives it 3 stars.