2067: sci-fi blockbuster contains a message on ecological themes

By Alberto Sclaverano

The 2020 Australian science fiction film 2067, written and directed by Seth Larney, combines entertainment elements with a message about the importance of protecting the environment.

In 2067 Earth has been devasted by the consequences of the climate crisis, combined with a world war fought using nuclear weapons. The planet is dying, plant life is gone and the atmosphere has become toxic for the surviving humans to breathe. Synthetic oxygen is keeping

a small number of survivors alive, but it is not a permanent solution, because is making people who only breathe it sick.

The main character, Ethan Whyte (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), belongs to a community of survivors who live in Australia. They are working on a time machine to go back in time and change the course of events, but they then receive a surprising signal from the future.

Sometimes want Ethan to be sent 400 years ahead. He accepts the mission and will discover a world that again has beautiful forests and clean air. What happened, and what is the key to changing the past?

The solution to the mystery is complex and not very credible, clearly inspired by the average Hollywood blockbuster, but the movie has a certain appeal in the description of the apocalyptic 2067 reality.

This dystopian future seems to take to extreme the current problems we are experiencing. The climate crisis has gone completely out of control, and Earth’s resources are exhausted, to the

point that even oxygen has become a scarce substance and life itself is no more sustainable.

Global nuclear war, whose specter is today sadly more present than ever in the world, has completed the list of catastrophes and contributed to the Earth’s ecosystem destruction. This nightmarish scenario is simply our reality taken to the extreme, in which all the crises we are experiencing are made way worse. The “sickness”, the mysterious illness connected to the abuse of synthetic oxygen, is not necessarily a reference to Covid-19 but reflects the general

concern with new types of deadly plagues.

The images of the movies, sometimes too colorful and borderline to camp when they show the time-travel technology, do not reduce its overall impact. The description of our possible future is grim and scary, but there is still hope to change it and avoid the catastrophe.

The happy ending involves a complex scheme that goes back and forth in time. We could think of an easier way to save ourselves and avoid living in a world like the one depicted in 2067.

Simple, even if difficult to apply, solutions could consist of tackling the climate crisis while we still have time and devoting our resources to mankind’s wellness and the planet instead of war.

Unfortunately, avid interests, denialist politicians and autocrats are putting our future in grave danger. We risk, tells the film, awakening in a world in which the ecosystem collapses while the great powers go to war against each other. A dystopian future that we need to avoid.