With the long break between the legendary anthology dystopian series “Black Mirror”, there was a completely empty space on that field. Numerous content tried to pick up where Charlie Brooker’s brilliant and terrifying dystopia left off, but none of them succeeded. Not even the anthology dystopian mini-series of the well-known American filmmaker Scott Z. Burns, an experienced screenwriter and producer, occasionally a director, best known as an associate of Steven Soderbergh. It was Burns who wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s “Contagion,” a disaster movie loaded with famous actors that became interesting again when the coronavirus pandemic appeared.
Burns is now again predicting a catastrophe of global proportions in an eight-part dystopian series that takes place in the period from 2037 to 2070 and whose biggest problem is that it failed to function as a whole. The story begins in the year 2037, when it is already clear that the world has gone to hell and that we are not doing well because of the climate-ecological catastrophe. The world is becoming more and more polluted and warmer, animal species are dying out, disaster has arrived, and we see at the beginning that the world leaders are still arguing and nothing concrete is being undertaken. The only one who seems to want to start something is technology mogul Nicholas Bilton (Kit Harington), but he’s also one of those guys who only does everything for his own profit.
The character of that tech-billionaire is actually the only one who, if he doesn’t already appear, is at least mentioned in every episode that offers imagining and thinking about what life on Earth could look like in the decades ahead. And if you ask Burns, we are not writing well and there is very little time left before we destroy everything and make the planet almost uninhabitable. As each episode takes place some year in the future, at the beginning of each episode we learn how many degrees the Earth has warmed in that period. And the world is heating up rapidly, as the years go by the situation is getting worse, and somehow as technology advances, everything else goes to hell more and more.
Watching not only “Extrapolations”, but also all similar content dealing with cataclysms, the thought crosses my mind that maybe we don’t deserve anything better than for everything to go to the beautiful quratz and to self-destruct because we really are an invasive species that destroys everything around yourself. It’s a real shame that this series didn’t work as I had hoped, because there is a lot of interesting, complex, intriguing stuff to think about. These stories from the near future are told from various perspectives and from the situations of people who are in different situations. Perhaps the most interesting episode for me was one that, stylistically and thematically, completely jumps out from everything else and we follow some wacky smugglers in India.
He filled the Burns series with really countless famous faces, so Edward Norton, Meryl Streep, David Schwimmer, Diane Lane, Sienna Miller, Marion Cottilard, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire, Keri Russell, Tahar Rahim and many, many others. In terms of genre, it constantly oscillates between drama and more or less subtle black comedy, and this near-future world that Burns imagines looks really scary. In addition to what our lives will look like due to the development of technology, artificial intelligence and everything else that goes with it, “Extrapolations” also imagines how relationships between people could look like in that world that no longer looks like the world we know. He imagines how this impending disaster will affect people’s thinking, religion, the way they live, how they eat, how they spend their time, and it’s obvious that Burns wanted to grab absolutely everything, so maybe that’s why he got a little lost.