In ‘2048,’ life is virtual and not great
Adam Bird is an oldschool dude. He refuses to work from home, as his coworkers and apparently the rest of humanity do. He shows up in the office, drinks an awful cup of coffee and sits in an empty conference room arguing with his colleagues as he wears a virtual reality device.
To get to the office, he drives on an empty highway. The ozone layer is a thing of the past, which means the sun and bad air are lethal. The sky is like the apocalyptic orange that enveloped the Bay Area recently, and Adam — wearing a hazmat suit — drives through it in a convertible.
It is the year 2048, and Adam is your typical modern human: a slave to his job, going through a divorce, escaping into his virtual fantasies — however, he refuses to take, as is required by law, the antidepressant 001LithiumX. So he’s pretty depressed.
Guy Moshe’s “LX 2048,” available to stream Friday, Sept. 25, is a lowbudget science fiction film that’s ideadriven, examining our present through a possible future. Achieving a unique look through a few simple effects.
The trouble is, many of those ideas are not thought through. But at least
it has ideas; many films don’t. Scifi geeks and those looking for something decidedly offbeat might want to check it out.
It has a deliciously nervous central performance by James D’Arcy, the British actor (Marvel’s “Agent Carter,” “Broadchurch”) who recently made his directorial debut (”Made in Italy”), and a most welcome supporting performance — more of an extended cameo — by Oakland’s Delroy Lindo, who is getting early Oscar buzz for his turn in Spike Lee’s “Da 5
Bloods.”
A little bit of the plot: Adam works for a company that has produced much of this virtual technology, and he is going through a messy custody battle for his three children with his wife, Reena (Anna Brewster). The marriage collapsed because she caught him cheating — virtually — with a woman who doesn’t exist (Gabrielle Cassi).
When Adam is diagnosed with a fatal heart condition, he is scheduled to be replaced by a clone as part of a government insurance plan. He doesn’t have a choice. Scrambling for a way to stay alive and stave off his replica, Adam locates the mysterious inventor of his company’s technology (Lindo), who has been living off the grid, to help him use technology to reprogram his heart.
There are many more story wrinkles in “LX 2048,” which will go undisclosed here.
The film is scattershot, like a shotgun blast. The first half plays out as a sort of futuristic “Kramer vs. Kramer,” a divorce drama and custody battle (the three emptyheaded kids basically spend all their time in their own virtual worlds). The second half devolves into a noirish murder plot with labyrinthine twists.
Of course, there are many logical gaps. If everyone at his company works from home, why do they have an office? If no one drives, how are the highways so well maintained? If the technology exists to create clones, can’t scientists use cloned cells to create a new heart? And so on.
The watchable “LX 2048” certainly gets an “A” for effort, including a creative take on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. I’m not sure how good a movie it is, but it would be an excellent basis for a streaming series, in which its ambitious ideas would have time to develop.