Offbeat ‘LX 2048’ gets ‘A’ for effort
LX 2048 Not rated. Running time: 103 minutes. Available Friday, Sept. 25, on most major streaming rental platforms. 1⁄2 out of 4 2
Adam Bird is an old school dude. He refuses to work from home, as his co-workers 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, and the sun and bad air are lethal. The sky is like the apocalyptic orange that enveloped the San Francisco Bay Area recently, and Adam drives through it in a convertible and a Hazmat suit.
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 anti-depressant 001LithiumX. So he’s pretty depressed.
Guy Moshe’s “LX 2048” is the kind of low-budget science fiction film I crave:
Idea-driven, 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. I admired its chutzpah. Sci-fi geeks and those looking for something decidedly offbeat
might want to check it out.
And 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 Delray Lindo, who is getting early
Oscar buzz for his turn in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.”
Alittle bit of the plot: Adam works for a company that has produced much of this virtual technology, and 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 (their three empty-headed kids basically spend all their time in their own virtual worlds). The second half devolves into a film 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 crate 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.