Nothing is more of its time than a vision of the future. Although some have endured better than others, this is especially true of the dystopian film and literature that emerged in the early 20th century. Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) could only have come out of a society rapidly transformed by industrialisation and the psychic damage of losing the first world war. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, published in 1931, predicted the endless supremacy of Fordism and the inter-war obsession with eugenics. George Orwell’s oft-cited Nineteen Eighty-Four was an attack on totalitarianism and specifically late Stalinism, and became a weapon in the emerging cold war. For his 2006 film adaptation of PD James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón asked what if the UK’s mid-2000s politics of surveillance, wartime nostalgia, media-led anti-migrant sentiment and post-industrial decline went unchecked – a question that has proved prescient.

British filmmaker Asif Kapadia’s new feature 2073 is the product of the post-crash politics of the 2010s and 2020s. The film – part dystopian thriller, part documentary – is a significant shift for Kapadia, best known for his brilliant trilogy of biopics about Ayrton Senna, Amy Winehouse and Diego Maradona, all made exclusively from archive footage. Those films were all studies of talented people who spent their entire adult lives in the public eye, with catastrophic results, demonstrating his considerable skill as a storyteller, researcher and editor. In 2073, Kapadia moves beyond fact into fiction and beyond the individual to the collective, charting the global rise of far-right demagogues and movements, and the nefarious impact of digital technology on work, politics, and society.

The film cuts between feature-style scenes about a woman trying to bring down a fascist police state in 2073, when “chairwoman” (Ivanka) Trump is celebrating her thirtieth year in power, and documentary sections about politics and technology in the early 2020s. This latter part features voiceovers from commentators such as Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr and Guardian columnist George Monbiot, as well as investigative journalists in India, the Philippines and elsewhere. The ambition is laudable, but sadly 2073 doesn’t work.

The film’s dystopian scenes are supposedly inspired by Chris Marker’s post-nuclear war masterpiece La Jetée (1962), but this is not readily discernible. They feel closer to Children of Men in being set in a physically dilapidated and politically degraded but recognisable extension of the present, with Samantha Morton playing Ghost, a woman living off-grid in an abandoned shopping centre in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco after an unspecified event in 2036. When Ghost is apprehended for reading subversive texts and encouraging her fellow outlaws to bring down the Trumpian dictatorship, she gets an interrogation like the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner (1982) and is even asked “What’s 2+2?”, a clunking allusion to an endlessly-referenced moment from Nineteen Eighty-Four. No real character or story that might energise an audience emerges from these – they do nothing new with the dystopian genre, and worse, the political analysis underpinning them feels desperately under-cooked.

2073 evidently wants to use the future to comment on the present but struggles to find anything new or insightful to say. In a trite conversation about the need for resistance with a Black former college professor (Naomie Ackie), Ghost complains about how no one in the 2020s “did anything” and then bluntly addresses the audience with “It’s too late for me, but maybe it’s not too late for you.” She clutches a battered copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, banned by this point, that she earlier found in a skip, as the word “fight” briefly flashes up on the screen, in excruciating neon pink, as if the segment’s message to its viewers, devoid of subtlety or subtext had not yet been made clear enough.

The issue here is that, in the UK and US at least, the social media manipulation, demagoguery and assault on workers’ rights that the documentary elements of 2073 describes are perfectly compatible with the availability of texts such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Since the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini, the western far right has worked out how to push its agenda in nominally democratic societies and realised that it is better to sideline radical thought rather than call attention to it by banning it, allowing people to discuss Malcolm X and others as long as they don’t take it into mainstream discourse, which constantly derides it, or use it as the basis for effective social movements I saw 2073 at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank, then went for a coffee in the nearby National Theatre café – the bookshop had a table full of Black radical authors.

These dystopian scenes feel tacked onto the longer documentary parts, and perhaps cynically, I wondered if they were there to bring in big-name actors and thus attract funding, giving what was otherwise an hour-long archive film the pulling power of a feature-length thriller. Certainly, I felt it would have been better as a more focused non-fiction work about the present. As it stood, these sections offered little that cannot be found in Adam Curtis’s works – although Kapadia’s collaboration with FilmFour allowed him access to news footage to compete with Curtis’s access to the BBC’s formidable collection, Curtis has a far more compelling visual imagination and infinitely better music. Now distributing his films through iPlayer, Curtis has the mixed blessing of far greater length, meaning he sometimes suffers from a lack of editing but can cut across topics for hours, notably in Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021). Even there, Curtis does not always convincingly draw connections between subjects or give fair attention to efforts to change the bleak contemporary circumstances he describes. 2073 comes nowhere near either, clocking in at just 85 minutes despite attempting to be two films at once.

Kapadia was one of the few prominent British cultural figures to publicly support Corbyn’s Labour in 2019 – by no means the be-all and end-all of political awareness, but a recognition that the UK had serious social problems caused by the neoliberal settlement that needed to be addressed, that proved many of the country’s intellectuals and artists. This makes some of the omissions and shortcomings in the contemporary sections of 2073’s analysis – as well as its choices about who provides it – surprising. The first voices we hear are neo-conservative Anne Applebaum, a staunch defender of the pre-2008 economic order, and LBC presenter James O’Brien, an angry opponent of the Labour left and advocate for the party’s shifts to the centre, first under Neil Kinnock and now Sir Keir Starmer.

Although you would expect the director of a documentary about Amy Winehouse to understand the rancid nature of the British press, the rise of the organised far right is ascribed to social media, with no mention of the role of legacy media in stoking anti-migrant sentiment or smearing anyone trying to address inequality. Social media is the bogeyman in conversations with Carole Cadwalladr about her work on the Brexit vote and Cambridge Analytica, again ignoring that British newspapers and TV networks put out all sorts of ludicrous bullshit about the EU for years before Facebook came into being (the EU’s own approach to migration, and its democratic deficits, do not feature in the film). The film draws links between Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and Boris Johnson – for whom O’Brien voted to be mayor of London in 2008 – and the Brexit result, but there is no reflection on how austerity, pushed by Cameron’s Conservatives, the post-crash Labour Party and mainstream media in unison, may have contributed to it. Nor does the collapse in faith in politics and journalism around the Iraq war get a mention.

Investigative journalists speak at greater length, and more effectively, about their work – Rana Ayyub, for example, discusses her exploration of Narendra Modi’s Hindutva nationalism from the Gujarat pogroms to the present, and the significant opprobrium it has attracted. That opprobrium is represented, as for Cadwalladr, by screencaps of aggressive and sometimes threatening tweets – all of which are bad, obviously, and intended to silence someone bravely standing up to modern forms of fascism. More on exactly which forms of censorship have come from the Indian government would have been illuminating, and another problem goes unaddressed: Ayyub says her work appears mostly in The Washington Post, a publication owned by another of 2073’s main villains, Jeff Bezos. Having also written for a variety of mainstream media (including the Post on one occasion), I appreciate the quandary: no outlet is perfect in its editorial policy or funding model. But it would have been good to at least raise this problem, rather than lionising journalists, and journalism, without any reflection on the industry’s role in building up the likes of Farage and Johnson, Trump and Bolsonaro, or in endlessly pulling political discourse to the right, simply resting instead on the implicit assumption that legacy media is good, social media bad.

2073 is better when exploring the emergence of tech billionaires and their nefarious influence over politics, reaching new heights of absurdity with Elon Musk’s involvement in Donald Trump’s election campaign, even if it does not fully explore their collusion with extant media systems in manufacturing consent for their grim visions of the future. The problem is more that it fails to say anything that its likely audience will not already know. Panning across a wide, familiar range of dictatorial figures, from Chinese president Xi Jinping’s Uyghur genocide to ex-Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s attacks on the indigenous Amazon population, though it does engage seriously with Israel’s surveillance and massacres in the West Bank and Gaza in a way that more centrist commentators might not have (Kapadia’s exploration of this is more thoughtful than some of his posts on Elon Musk’s X, for which he recently apologised and resigned a position with the Grierson Trust). Unfortunately, 2073 is structurally and politically unable to engage deeply with any of them, let alone propose any actions. Instead, with its complaints that “no one did anything” about looming disasters, it induces resignation and despair above anything else.

Is 2073 simply a missed opportunity, or is it indicative of the limits of which kinds of political films can be made in the current media climate? If it’s the former, then I hope Kapadia tries something similarly ambitious, perhaps more focused and certainly more rigorous in its outlook, in future: he is undoubtedly a talented director, despite this misstep. More established British political filmmakers are either pushed to the margins – the BBC no longer broadcast Curtis’s works on television – or retiring. Ken Loach, who like so many socially engaged screenwriters and directors made his name via the BBC’s Wednesday Play and Play for Today strands, and was one of the few British filmmakers to address the ravages of austerity and precarious labour, has made his final film, aged 90. The landscape isn’t entirely bleak, however: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest showed how a tightly focused film combined with careful media interventions could make a considerable impact.

I should also point out that it took Glazer until his mid-fifties to make such an important and unashamedly confrontational film – his fourth feature, 10 years after his previous one. This illustrates the size of the task for those who would like to see people involved with leftwing organising or intellectual culture turn their ideas and interests into well-funded and distributed films, as their predecessors did more readily throughout the 20th century. Today, the right has representatives in every major political party, newspapers and magazines, as well as controlling social media networks. It’s too simple to suggest the left try to infiltrate these in a similar way, but the intellectual and formal limitations of 2073 show us how much there is to be done in creating a media ecosystem in which films with a compelling class analysis can get made and widely distributed.