Stream It Or Skip It: ‘2067’ on Hulu, An Ambitious Sci-Fi Indie From Australia

In 2067 (Hulu), humanity has wrought enough ecological havoc that the world’s last corporation hawks canned synthetic oxygen, and scientists struggle to build a temporally shifting pathway to potential salvation. What will Kodi Smit-McPhee find on the other side of the portal? Does 2067 even know?

2067: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An audio supercut of news reports crackles over an image of our spinning globe. As we learn of rapid deforestation — “the last tree on earth was logged in the Amazon today” — the lights of the modern world wink out as earth’s oxygen supply is steadily choked off. By the time we meet our hero Ethan Whyte (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and his counterpart Jude (Ryan Kwanten), it’s 2067, and humanity is barely hanging on, crowded into one last Australian city. Ethan and Jude are linemen, working to keep the power grid strong enough to sustain the synthetic oxygen supply that’s humanity’s last lifeline. That this air exists at all is thanks to Chronicorp, earth’s last conglomerate, which also employed Ethan’s departed father as a scientist. One day the company’s CTO Regina Jackson (Deborah Mailman) calls Ethan with an offer he can’t refuse. She reveals the Chronicle, his father’s pet project. “Our hail mary,” Jackson calls it, the hope “that we somehow find a solution among our descendants in the future.” Yep, it’s a time machine. How do they know it works? Because when his dad tested it with radio waves, a message came back:  “Send Ethan Whyte.” He’s wary of leaving his wife, who’s dying from synthetic oxygen rejection. But he puts on the time/space getup, takes a deep breath, and goes.

When humanity finally died off, the earth could breathe again. When he arrives with a thud, Ethan is surrounded by greenery, ferns, living humus — a natural world, bursting with oxygen. He literally becomes a tree hugger. There are no people, and the city is an overgrown ruin, reclaimed by the earth. But he also discovers a skeleton wearing his time suit, so what’s that all about? More questions arise when Jude follows him through the Chronicle, but despite having been launched, just as we have been, from one dystopian future into that dystopian future’s own future, Ethan and Jude spend a large chunk of time wandering around and mumbling about faith, truth, and who’s protecting what, and we have no choice but to trudge through the ferns and flashbacks with them. 2067 slows to a laborious crawl as it tries to get its bearings inside all of the worlds it’s created.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Time travel, portals, the future communicating with the present — it’s been done before. (It was done scariest, by the way, in 1987’s Prince of Darkness.) What’s also been done before is 2067‘s angle on humanity destroying itself through ecological folly. In fact, when the corporate villain here says “humans are a virus,” she mirrors the opinion of Sullivan, the corporate villain in the recent Korean sci-fi outing Space Sweepers. Both baddie moguls plan to skate on their moral obligation to the rest of us. One looks to the future, while one looks to the stars.

Performance Worth Watching: The writing in 2067 pretty quickly telegraphs his Jude as a two-faced ally to Ethan. But Ryan Kwanten manages to twist the boyish charm that buoyed him as Jason Stackhouse on True Blood into a drawn, occasionally bug-eyed performance.

Memorable Dialogue: When time’s travel’s the thing, a film always requires an exposition nugget about its particular take on the technological knick knacks and temporal whatzits. In 2067, that nut graph goes a little something like this. The Chronicorp boss is showing off the Chronicle time portal for the first time, and pitching Ethan on stepping through it. There are just a few hiccups to go over.

“The Chronicle at this time can’t tether to itself in the future,” she says. “There’s something wrong at the other end.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we’re gonna have to throw you there,” the chief nerd of the time lab chimes in. “Without being tethered at the other end there’s a chance you could land inside a mountain or the ocean.”

With a few more vague protestations, Ethan dons his getup, which resembles a space suit attached to scaffolding.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: This Australian independent production from writer and director Seth Larney initially impresses with its convincing portrayal of a scarred and choked future earth. Despite the odds, society is still managing to wield technical knowhow in search of a solution. Ethan and Jude grind away at the underground power grid, while scientists and corporations in shiny glass rooms construct desperate portals to the future, and salvation. And all of this happens even as protestors against commoditized air self-immolate in the streets. (“Oxygen is not a privilege!”) But once it departs its future for another future, and the usual “allow myself to introduce myself” moments of cinematic time travel, 2067 starts playing a game of hurry up and wait. The promising bullet points it established at the start dissolve in a slurry of characters challenging each other about which direction to take, and not landing on any solutions. And in a string of expository flashbacks and sudden reveals of what’s really up, 2067 arrives at its hopeful conclusion with a bit of “ta dah!” that doesn’t feel fully realized, or truly deserved.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The vision 2067 reveals of where humanity’s ecological mistakes might take us is a compelling one. But the film can’t invest its characters with enough reason to be in either its own future or the future inside its future.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch 2067 on Hulu