Less than a week before the start of Day Five, another series is coming to our screens about our mistreatment of the planet and the consequences we suffer. science fiction drama “A Challenging Future” (AppleTV+from Friday the 17th) Less scary but also scarier. Behind him is a screenwriter and director who is adept at preparatory research and can make so-called fictional scenarios look terribly real. Inside ‘Contagious’just one of several scripts he wrote for the director Steven SoderberghWe had almost ten years ahead of us when we would have to live with covid-19. It was chilling to watch that movie in the midst of an epidemic: The old paranoid “thriller” was now a documentary.
Half a decade ago Burns had made a full-fledged documentary, Oscar-winning ‘A disturbing fact’A ‘slide’ adaptation of Al Gore on the dangers of global warming. We can understand ‘A challenge future’ as a fictional extension of that project that continued in 2017: Sometimes the best way to convey a message, make it digestible and engage the audience is to dramatize it and put charismatic faces on it.It’s a remnant of this series.
Meryl Streep Edward Norton, Sienna Miller And Among others, Kit Harington wanted to join Burns’ ambitious journey over three decades (2037-2070) into humanity’s possible near future. Almost every episode focuses on a different year, perspective, and theme: nature, industry, religion, everything that surrounds and composes us.
From satire to melodrama
The action kicks off in ‘2037’, when Tel Aviv hosts the 46th COP (United Nations climate summit), a controversial main topic: the possibility of limiting future global warming to two degrees Celsius. 1.5.
A wide variety of characters move through this ethical and political labyrinth, from the summit’s negotiators to the tech boss (Kit Harington in Elon Musk mode) who owns the patents for desalination and purification technologies that can solve droughts around the world. . Nicholas Bilton, whose name is (after the famous tech journalist) is said to be associated with a slick promoter (Matthew Rhys) to build a casino above the arctic circle. Sounds like a ‘Friendship’ subplot.
As early as ‘2046, black satire gives way to melodrama. Sienna Miller takes center stage as archivist Rebecca Shearer. Menagerie2100, a genome technology company dedicated to saving animals and plants from extinction; they decide which and by what methods, sometimes ethically questionable. But to the dubious decision, one of the series’ creators: Rebecca not only speaks to a whale through a translator technology, but credits it with the voice of the animal’s deceased mother (Meryl Streep).
More sensitive than emotional, ‘2047’ is what Rabbi Marshall (daveed diggsfrom the musical ‘Hamilton’ and rap group Clipping) Keeping the Miami synagogue (literally) afloat in the face of rising sea levels and tropical storms. Along the way, he makes morally questionable decisions while befriending Alana (Neska Rose), a Jewish teenager amid a comical crisis of faith.
Between disappointment and optimism
From time to time, you can see Scott Z. Burns resolving his inner conflicts through his characters and the arguments between them. Like its author, the series oscillates between disappointed and optimistic, painful and inspiring. “People who know me will probably say I’m darker and drier than most other people. But I know we have all the solutions to all these problems.”he said in ‘The New York Times’ this week.
Burns also has no doubts about the beauty of future technology. As might be expected with Apple products, “A Challenging Future” is the main attraction, with a dazzlingly brilliant visual design and a catalog of technological advances, including: translucent monitors, not ugly VR glasses, and (Zuckerberg breathes) something akin to ‘Worlds of the Horizon’Meta’s first metadata repository.