2073: An Anti-intellectual Film, Disguised as Anti-establishment Heroism

Bryant McGill · 2073: An Anti-intellectual Film, Disguised as Anti-establishment Heroism

**Links**: [Blogger](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/12/2073-anti-intellectual-film.html) | [Substack](https://bryantmcgill.substack.com/p/2073-an-anti-intellectual-film-disguised) | Medium | Wordpress | [Soundcloud 🎧](https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill/2073-movie-review) Watching **2073**, I became increasingly aware that its dystopian future is less a speculative exercise than a carefully engineered accusation, one that relies on naming—or at least unmistakably implying—specific global technology actors as architects of an emerging, totalizing surveillance regime. The film repeatedly gestures toward figures like **Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and especially Peter Thiel**, whose platforms and investments are framed as population-scale behavioral instruments; toward **Palantir** (explicitly named and visually prominent, with its logo looming in the fictional New San Francisco streets), positioned as the analytical spine of predictive governance and security-state omniscience; and by extension (innuendo and inference) toward the broader Silicon Valley constellation—Meta, Google, Amazon, and adjacent data brokers—portrayed as the civilian-facing half of a unified surveillance stack. These actors are not debated or contextualized so much as coded, visually and narratively, into a single archetype: the technocratic engineer whose data systems metastasize into authoritarian control. The implication is that “data-driven” governance is not a toolset but a moral pathology, and that anyone building large-scale computational infrastructure is already halfway to fascism.

This framing becomes far more charged when the film turns to Israel and Gaza, where nuance is simultaneously invoked and erased. 2073 deploys real drone footage and images of destroyed urban environments in Gaza and the West Bank as an emotional anchor, deliberately inducing a state of heightened moral suggestibility. These images are then montaged alongside discussions of future surveillance states, drawing an associative line—through montage and juxtaposition—between contemporary Israeli security technology and a fictionalized global police dystopia. What is striking is not that Gaza appears—any serious engagement with modern conflict would confront it—but that the film offers almost no structural context for why Israeli surveillance and defense systems exist in the first place. The role of Hamas, the reality of asymmetric warfare (including rocket attacks, tunnel networks, human shields, and insidious information warfare—like this film), and the persistent regional threats that make intelligence-driven defense a grim necessity are effectively absent. The result is a flattened moral landscape in which state action is always oppressive, non-state violence is backgrounded or erased, and the distinction between defensive necessity and authoritarian excess is collapsed by design. As the narrative progresses, the film completes its villainous synthesis. The Israeli soldier, the Silicon Valley tech executive, and the abstract authoritarian dictator are visually and rhetorically fused into a single enemy figure, a composite symbol of domination that the viewer is encouraged to loathe instinctively rather than analyze. This synthesis is reinforced by strategic omission: by foregrounding “dehumanized” civilian suffering while excluding the ideological commitments and governance models of radical Islamist movements, the film creates a vacuum of explanation that it then fills with anti-establishment dogma. Within that vacuum, “rioters and protesters” are elevated as the sole remaining moral agents, framed not as one political tactic among many but as the only hope against a world sliding toward techno-fascism. For me, this was the point at which the film crossed from critique into advocacy, issuing what amounts to a call to disorder that morally licenses the same asymmetric disruption that destabilizes liberal democracies. What makes this especially dangerous is the way 2073 operates on memory rather than argument. Its repeated insistence—explicit even in its promotional language—that “it’s our memory they want to wipe out” signals an intent to overwrite historical complexity with revolutionary folklore. For an uncritical viewer, the experience functions as an ontological reset: the defensive apparatus of the techno-state is reinterpreted as the primary engine of apocalypse, while protest culture is romanticized as redemptive by default. In this sense, the film behaves less like a warning than a digital radicalization ecosystem compressed into cinematic form, shifting the Overton window toward a wholesale rejection of modern civilization’s technological foundations. The darkest irony, and what left me most unsettled, is that the dystopia 2073 claims to fear is precisely the one it seems to wish into being—by inciting resentment, legitimizing unrest, and recruiting humanitarian impulse into a narrative that ultimately serves the very forces it refuses to name. In other words, it repeatedly stages a world already torn to shreds—cities fractured, institutions hollowed out, and human beings quite literally tearing other human beings apart in the streets amid violent protest and perpetual unrest—while simultaneously insisting that this condition is the inevitable consequence of technological modernity. What becomes unmistakable, once you step back from the spectacle, is that this imagery is not merely descriptive but performative. The film engineers a feedback loop in which the viewer is first saturated with images of collapse, then emotionally primed through grief and rage, and finally offered disorder itself as the only remaining moral response. For the ill-informed, the unthinking, or the nuance-blind viewer—those without an understanding of adversarial geopolitics, asymmetric warfare, or why techno-sovereign defense infrastructures exist at all—the film does not provoke reflection; it induces pathos. That is where the self-fulfilling nature of the project becomes clear. 2073 warns of streets filled with rage, but it achieves this warning by rehearsing the emotional and symbolic conditions that send people into the streets in the first place. It collapses causality so thoroughly that protest is no longer a contingent reaction to specific failures but an almost sacred reflex, pre-sanctified by cinematic prophecy. The film’s dystopia is not something it fears so much as something it performs in advance, inviting viewers to inhabit the psychology of collapse long before any such future arrives. In doing so, it externalizes responsibility: if unrest follows, the film can claim vindication rather than authorship. This is why I ultimately experienced 2073 not as a cautionary tale but as a work with a kind of death wish embedded at its core. It visualizes social disintegration, moralizes it, aestheticizes it, and then releases it back into the world as inevitability. The tragedy is not simply that it misrepresents the necessity of techno-states or the brutal complexity of Israel and Gaza; it is that it recruits humanitarian instinct into a narrative that erodes the very structures required to prevent the violence it so obsessively displays. In that sense, the film is less a mirror held up to a broken world than a hammer swung repeatedly at the fragile scaffolding still holding that world together. The hammer, of course, is already in motion—swung not just by the film itself but by a broader cultural apparatus that mistakes deconstruction for liberation and equates the dismantling of inherited structures with moral progress. 2073 does not merely depict a world without functioning institutions; it celebrates the emotional catharsis of their absence, presenting the raw spectacle of human suffering and street-level chaos as a kind of purifying fire. In this, it aligns itself—perhaps unwittingly—with a strain of apocalyptic romanticism that has long haunted the radical imagination: the belief that true humanity emerges only in the ruins, that order is inherently tyrannical, and that the techno-state's defenses against disorder are themselves the original sin. Yet this romanticism is selective, fixated on the visible instruments of control while rendering invisible the predatory ideologies and non-state actors that necessitate those instruments in the first place. What remains after the credits roll is not a call to reasoned resistance but an invitation to surrender to the very entropy the film purports to warn against. By aestheticizing collapse and pathologizing the imperfect mechanisms that stave it off, 2073 contributes to a cultural script in which stability is suspect, resilience is complicity, and the only authentic response to complexity is rage. The viewer, primed by montage and omission, is left not empowered but exhausted—convinced that the scaffolding is already too rotten to repair, and that swinging the hammer harder is the only remaining virtue. In the end, the film's deepest betrayal is not of history or nuance, but of the audience's capacity for hope grounded in reality: it offers despair as insight, disintegration as destiny, and calls it prophecy. This is the paradox at the heart of such projects. They rail against a future they claim is engineered by elites, yet they themselves engineer the psychological conditions—resentment without context, grief without proportion—that make orderly, liberal-democratic renewal seem impossible. 2073 is powerful cinema, undeniably. But power without responsibility is merely force, and in wielding it so indiscriminately, the film risks becoming the very accelerant it pretends to expose. Yet the deepest complicity lies in the film's tacit endorsement of mobs—not as thoughtful collectives but as large, reflexive, twitching, crude limbic organisms. They are necessarily stupid in their aggregate form, akin to fire: capable of burning and converting everything to ash, but devoid of the alchemical understanding required to create or sustain. They don't know how to build things, and they certainly, as a mob, don't have access to nuance; instead, they operate on primal impulses, suspicion, and uninformed reflexes to break and harm. The world runs on systems and complexities that the mob not only fails to understand but has little awareness of beyond vague distrust. These systems are rooted in intricacies their primitive, ignorant minds can't grasp, yet those very nuances deliver vital, near-homeostatic infrastructure—providing protection against asymmetric and largely invisible enemies that also thrive in complexity, while underpinning our ability to deliver clean water, feed populations, educate generations, develop medical technologies, and advance the human condition in positive ways, all while safeguarding our already precarious capacity to survive into the future.

This film puts a stick in the hand of every protester when the world desperately needs the precise hands of watchmakers. It lights a match in the heart of rage kindled by ignorance, fanning flames that could consume the delicate mechanisms of civilization without offering a blueprint for what comes after. In romanticizing the mob's destructive potential as a form of purity or justice, 2073 ignores the historical truth that such forces rarely birth utopias; more often, they usher in vacuums filled by even more ruthless authoritarians. The film's creators, perched safely in their editing suites, seem oblivious to this, or perhaps complicit—crafting a narrative that flatters the viewer's indignation while eroding the intellectual tools needed to navigate real-world threats. What we're left with is not empowerment, but a seductive illusion: the belief that tearing down is tantamount to transcendence, when in reality, it risks reducing us all to scavengers amid the ruins. Ultimately, 2073's greatest flaw is its anti-intellectual core, disguised as anti-establishment heroism. The writers, directors, and producers, in their smug certainty, mistake montage for insight and emotional manipulation for profundity—revealing not just a contempt for complexity, but an intellectual laziness so profound it borders on self-parody. One suspects they believe their own audience is too dim to notice the contradictions, or perhaps they’re simply projecting: incapable of grappling with nuance themselves, they flatter viewers with the illusion of depth while serving up the cinematic equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum. By vilifying complexity as conspiracy and elevating instinctual outrage as virtue, it discourages the very curiosity and rigor that could foster genuine progress. The mob it implicitly champions isn't a solution; it's a symptom of the film's own myopia, a force that devours without discernment. If this cinematic vision takes hold, we won't need to wait until 2073 for dystopia—it will arrive on the wings of well-intentioned fury, unguided by wisdom or restraint. And in that world, the watchmakers will be the first to flee, leaving only the ashes for the fire to claim. I have spent much of my life advocating for peace—quietly, persistently—through writings like my book *Voice of Reason*, a work that condemns systemic violence in all its forms, predatory corporate power, the madness of perpetual war-consciousness, and every authoritarian structure that silences dissent or crushes the human spirit. I have called for non-violent awakening, for greater consciousness, compassion, and listening; I have argued that truth-telling is the only real revolution, that love alone heals violence, and that our interconnectedness makes all suffering shared. I have tried, in whatever small way I can, to take torches out of angry hands and replace them with light. I watched this film with a rare familiarity—as one who has labored for decades in the very space the creators claim to inhabit. I watch Asif Kapadia, Tony Grisoni, and their collaborators present *2073* as an urgent humanitarian warning, a “punch in the stomach” against authoritarian surveillance, unchecked tech tyranny, state violence, and the erosion of human dignity. They position themselves, understandably, on the side of compassion, non-violence, memory-preservation, and resistance to oppressive power. Gaza imagery becomes, in their hands, a visceral emblem of dehumanizing control; billionaire influence and surveillance exports are rightly named as threats. Yet the film they have made betrays nearly every principle it claims to defend. Where I have insisted on universalist compassion that refuses to flatten contexts or erase defensive necessities, *2073* selectively omits, emotionally manipulates, and quietly romanticizes the mob. Where I have argued that genuine resistance requires rigor, restraint, and the patient maintenance of fragile order, this film aestheticizes collapse, recruits grief into radicalization, and elevates instinctive disorder above reasoned stewardship. Where I have spent years trying to extinguish cycles of violence by appealing to our higher consciousness, *2073*—perhaps unwittingly—hands out matches disguised as warnings, lighting them in hearts already raw with rage. I am sure the filmmakers would prefer to dismiss this critique as contrarian apologia for the status quo, or even as quiet complicity with power. But that escape is not available to them. This is not the voice of a law-and-order reactionary defending surveillance for its own sake. My public record is saturated with opposition to dehumanization, corporate predation, and authoritarian control—this is the voice of someone who shares many of their stated aims, and who therefore can see clearly where they abandoned them.** Perhaps that is the deepest irony: a film that styles itself as a dire warning against impending catastrophe has itself become the very hazard it claims to expose—one that plays carelessly with fire in a world already smoldering. This is why, despite everything, I still encourage thoughtful viewers to see *2073* for themselves. Engage it critically, with eyes wide open to its manipulations and omissions. Let it provoke you, but do not let it radicalize you. If this review serves as any kind of warning, let it read: Handle with care. Contents highly flammable.

### Credits and Acknowledgments In the spirit of matching the posture adopted by those who produced and promoted *2073*,I offer the following attribution. This is a comprehensive list of key contributors drawn from official sources including IMDb, production announcements, and festival listings. Their collective effort produced a film that, as argued above, warns of a dystopian future while itself exhibiting several recognizable precursors of dystopian propaganda. It may not be shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, but it is undeniably distributing the matches. This acknowledgment is not just ceremonial. The work presented in *2073* is not accidental, not emergent, and not naïvely unintentional. It is engineered—through montage choices, strategic omissions, affective pacing, and symbolic fusions that reliably generate a specific psychological and political outcome. What follows is a record of those who made those choices and enabled their distribution. **Director and Writer** * **[Asif Kapadia](https://www.asifkapadia.com/)** **Co-Writer** * **[Tony Grisoni](http://www.tonygrisoni.co.uk/)** **Principal Cast (Fictional Elements)** * Samantha Morton (as Ghost / Narrator – voiceover) * Naomi Ackie (as Professor) * Hector Hewer (as Jack) **Featured Interviewees / Talking Heads (as themselves)** * Maria Ressa * Carole Cadwalladr * Rana Ayyub * Ben Rhodes * Rahima Mahmut * Silkie Carlo * Cori Crider * **[George Monbiot](https://www.monbiot.com/)** * Nina Schick * Chris Smalls * Douglas Rushkoff * Carmody Grey * **[Tristan Harris](https://www.tristanharris.com/)** * James O’Brien * **[Anne Applebaum](https://www.anneapplebaum.com/)** * Antony Lowenstein **Archive Footage Figures** (including political leaders portrayed as harbingers) * Nigel Farage * Viktor Orbán * Narendra Modi * Mohammad bin Salman * Rodrigo Duterte * Mohammed al-Bashir (likely Sudan reference) * Additional figures referenced in montage (e.g., Trump family implications) **Producers** * **Asif Kapadia** (Lafcadia Productions) * George Chignell **Executive Producers** * Farhana Bhula * Chris King * Ollie Madden * Dana O’Keefe * Dan O’Meara * Tom Quinn * Emily Sellinger * Eric Sloss * John Sloss * Nicole Stott * Emily Thomas * **[Davis Guggenheim](http://www.davisguggenheim.com/)** (Concordia Studio) * Jonathan Silberberg (Concordia Studio) * **[Riz Ahmed](https://rizahmed.komi.io/)** (via Left Handed Films) **Key Crew** * Director of Photography: Bradford Young * Editors: Chris King, Sylvie Landra * Composer: Antonio Pinto * Production Designer: Robin Brown * Costume Designer: Verity May Lane * Casting Director: Shaheen Baig **Production Companies and Financiers** * Lafcadia Productions * **[Neon](https://www.neonrated.com/)** (U.S. distributor) * **[Film4 Productions](https://www.film4productions.com/)** * Double Agent * **[Concordia Studio](https://concordia.studio/)** * Left Handed Films * Sheep Thief Films This network of filmmakers, financiers, distributors, and voices brought *2073* to the screen. Their vision, as presented, is a clear demonstration of cinema’s power not merely to depict futures, but to condition audiences toward particular interpretations of the present. Thank you to all involved for providing material worthy of serious scrutiny.