Starting on Feb. 1, sci-fi fans who subscribe to HBO Max can watch an underrated movie from director Asif Kapadia. 2073 was released in 2024 and was written by Kapadia and Tony Grisoni and stars Samantha Morton (The Whale), Naomi Ackie (Mickey 17), Hector Hewer and Nigel Farage.
The British sci-fi docudrama movie is streaming on HBO Max as of Feb. 1. 2073 is set in a dystopian future and takes its inspiration from Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette titled La Jetée and takes on hard-hitting subjects like climate change, corporate fascism, and a waning democracy. Director Asif Kapadia previously won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, Feature back in 2016 for his film titled Amy.
2073 first premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2024. The film, from Neon, had a small box office take of just $59,000, according to Box Office Mojo. A synopsis of 2073 reads: “It’s the year 2073, and the worst fears of modern life have been realized. Surveillance drones fill the burnt orange skies and militarized police roam the wrecked streets, while survivors hide away underground, struggling to remember a free and hopeful existence.”
The movie currently has a “rotten” 49% on Rotten Tomatoes from 45 critical reviews and a 43% audience rating from about 250 fan reviews. In a 2024 interview with CBR, Kapadia talked about how unique 2073 was and explained how the film differed from other films in the post-apocalyptic genre.
Kapadia on Flipping a Genre On Its Head
Neon /Courtesy Everett Collection
“What I wanted to do with 2073 was, most people kind of recreate the future. It’s a fiction or it’s lots of visual effects, and you want to have lots of flying cars and all of this,” began Kapadia. “I just thought, well, can I do that, but flip it on its head? Every part of the scariest things, the worst things, the most epic things, the most terrifying moments, most violent moments — they’re all factual. They’re all real things and have all been happening essentially in the last 10 years,” he said.
Kapadia continued, “The most terrifying everything in here is based on real good research and journalism. The drama element, the spine of the film, the Samantha Morton [part], that is the bit that we shot. That’s the fiction. Everything else that you see is based on fact. I don’t know if anyone else has done that.”
He added that he took a lot of 2073 from actual news. “[The movie] is based absolutely on factual footage, most of which originally I saw through social media,” he said. “We’re sort of commenting on social media and we’re commenting on technology, but the material has come from these places. The most horrific things we can find online on social media — kids see this stuff all the time. We see this stuff. We just zoom past it, [saying] “I don’t want to see that, it’s too much.” I was like, can we make a movie out of this?” he concluded.
2073 is streaming on HBO Max.
Release Date
September 3, 2024
Runtime
85 Minutes
Director
Asif Kapadia
Writers
Asif Kapadia, Tony Grisoni
Producers
John Sloss, Tom Quinn, Dan O’Meara, Nicole Stott, Ollie Madden, Dana O’Keefe, George Chignell
Samantha Morton
Uncredited
