reviewIn Hollywood, disaster dramas are mainly made about the future of our earth. Usually those attempts degenerated into zombie movies and series, such as The Last of Us, in which human mutants try to wipe out the remaining Earthlings.
This offer can hardly be called realistic. The drama series extrapolations Apple TV+ does have this pretension. To begin with, each episode is introduced with graphs showing how much global warming will be in 20, 30, 40 years. The consequences are unquenchable forest fires, massive floods, extinct animal species and children who are no longer able to withstand the bright sunlight due to the pollution.
To convey the message as clearly as possible extrapolations of the big names. Meryl Streep pops up as a posthumous character. She is the cancer-deceased mother of a scientist, played by Sienna Miller, who can communicate with the last remaining humpback whale that she has given her mother’s voice through computers. The female animal is diligently looking for a male partner to reproduce, but that is an impossible mission.
Warning
The viewer is not really happy extrapolations. The creator of the series, Scott Z. Burns, has a reputation for doom dramas. He wrote the epidemic production Contagion by Steven Soderbergh and was also involved in the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.
Everything shows that Burns sees his new series as a warning to point out to his contemporaries the risks we run. The word nitrogen is not mentioned, but the other dangers are far-reaching enough. When the series has arrived in 2060, the earth has become a desert where life is barely possible.
Collection of top actors
In addition to Meryl Streep, the series features another collection of top actors appearing in supporting roles; Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire, Diane Lane and Edward Norton.
Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones, Brimstone) plays an important role as the multi-billionaire Nick Bilton (a kind of Elon Musk squared) who owns and exploits all kinds of patents that can affect the environment. He ends up before the International Court of Justice in The Hague around 2060, where he is accused of ecocide.
extrapolations looks impressive at times. Unfortunately, the unbalanced narrative structure dominates, making it difficult to really empathize with the characters. Given the well-intentioned message, that is a shame.
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