We certainly live in troubling times. Hardly a day goes by without us hearing about terrible news, cataclysmic predictions concerning the future of our environment, and our very species’ survival.
But that’s hardly surprising: we know bad news sells.
Australian director Damon Gameau’s second feature documentary is trying to tell the same story, but in a different way, imagining what the world would be like when his daughter is 25 years old – in 2040.
In order to make this film, he’s travelled the globe looking for current existing technologies that could help improve all of our lives, regenerate the environment, and show us that we have it in our power to do something positive for the world, without taking absolute drastic action.
He calls this fact-based dreaming, and I must say, it sure is a refreshing take.
The movie is broken down in sections, looking at how to generate power, revolutionise transportation, agriculture, marine permaculture, and education.
If you’ve been researching the subject, none of this will come as a surprise, and it’s good to know that we can make a big difference, even perform meaningful carbon sequestration – that’s when we take the CO2 from the air and lock it back into the soil – without having to deploy and rely on new, and as yet, totally unproven technologies, but instead by harnessing the power of nature.
Damon guides you through this journey in a easy laid back way, with a fair amount of humour. Jumping from children talking to the camera, to interviewing people who are currently doing the practical research that he’s showing us in his film, and then taking fanciful trips to a hypothetical 2040, where his grown up daughter interacts in a world he hopes we’ll create for her, and all our children.
There’s a lot of special effects, especially in the segments designed to portray an idyllic 2040, echoing those old movies from the 60s and 70s about how the future would look – mixed in with an extrapolation of tech we use today. It’s effective in telling his story, but does also detract. Time could’ve been better spent taking a more in depth look at the technologies he was showcasing.
Because of this, the movie barely scratches the surface, feels too light on facts, doesn’t deal with any negative sides to any solution or technology he’s advocating, and neatly sidesteps any political or societal resistance to any of those ideas.
However, the aim of this movie is clearly to entice you to learn more, and to that end, Damon encourages you to visit whatsyour2040.com to do just that. You can also use that site to figure out if the movie is playing somewhere near you, as it’s not getting anything like a wide cinematic release.
If you’re tired of hearing how bad we’ve been, how we must aspire to reducing our existence so we live as the poorest one billion do (as Extinction Rebellion appear to be promoting), and want to see a positive film, offering some potential solutions to our current dilemma laced with some offbeat humour, 2040 is the film for you. If anything it’ll help you realise that the world isn’t necessarily ending, and we can breathe a sigh of relief, before rolling up our sleeves and doing something positive to help make our only planet a better place.
Have you seen 2040? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments, and let’s get the conversation going.
2040, Climate change, Climate Emergency, Damon Gameau, Feature film, featured, movie, Review
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