“2073” (2024) is a mix of a sci-fi dystopian documentary and drama. In New San Francisco, the new capital of the Americas, Ghost (Samantha Morton), a woman who lives off the grid underground in a shopping center, contemplates how the world became an authoritarian, unlivable place when she is not scavenging for the people who live in the same abandoned, decaying structure. The US and most of the world is awash in drones and militarized police. When she thinks of the past and all the disappeared people, the documentary part kicks in and addresses the suppression of media and free speech, climate change and expansion of oligarchs. When will she be caught?

A lot of you did not grow up fundamentalist, and it shows. Throw out the details of concepts like the tribulation, rapture and anti-Christ, keep the Mark of the Beast, with a revamped multiheaded technological beast, and you have a repurposed progressive version of an apocalyptic and dystopian tale to motivate people to act. At least Christian fundamentalists give clearer instructions: accept Jesus as your Lord and savior and don’t take the Mark of the Beast, and then you will be saved. “2073” catalogues a lot of valid problems without offering practical solutions. The list of new Anti Christs is plentiful and includes most world leaders, including Presidon’t, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Erin, Larry Page. Apparently, Tim Cook is safe. Wear black turtlenecks and keep buying Apple products.

“2073” assumes that the audience will recognize these men without introducing them, which will not help future viewers. Nobody lives forever. Sound bites from disembodied talking heads like Cori Crider, a human rights lawyer, and Tristan Harris, the founder of Humane Technology, discuss autocrats in the abstract and their unelected power to modify human behavior, but this documentary stays on the superficial level without getting into the logistics of how mind control is achieved. Aza Raskin, founder of Center of Humane Technology, discusses artificial intelligence, “the total decoding and synthesizing of reality,” and AI expert Nina Schick backs him up with her voice overlaid on images of the Pope in a puffer coat. In the old days, the Pope had a brief stint as a possible anti-Christ. Now he is just a punchline. Body snatchers are not aliens, but data miners of human intelligence and behavior to exacerbate the class divide according to AI scientist Kai-Fu Lee, benefiting libertarian tech bros who undermine, exploit and dismantle the government according to Max Chafkin, a tech reporter, and futurist Douglas Ruschkoff, who likens this move to world domination through a techno monarchy. Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee turned union organizer, is probably the most recognizable name and voice in the sea of chaos waving the flag on this crisis.

Director and cowriter Asif Kapadia is best known for creating the definitive film about Amy Winehouse, “Amy” (2015), so this creative approach to a documentary may seem like an exciting way to get people interested in important issues by sensationalizing and translating it to the cinematic language that is most popular to consume. As someone who adores fake documentaries and found footage films, I consider “2073” to be a dangerous film because it critiques how reactionary, authoritarian forces fictionalize reality by doing the same. So when these issues are provided with little to no context, the average moviegoer encountering similar images outside of theater such as the world on fire, which is probably gleaned from one of the numerous deadly wildfires in recent years, these images are not a wakeup call, but a spectacle that is easily dismissed as part of last night’s entertainment instead of an urgent call to action. Though documentaries’ stories can possess a narrative structure, it should feel real as if it is organically unfolding and can be easily retold. This documentary is a cacophony of voices and images, and the more factual it is, the images are more diluted with computerized graphics to make it feel like the latest sci-fi blockbuster—an unofficial sequel to “Minority Report” (2002) complete with a clip from the film. If Kapadia was not trying to be the truth’s biggest op, he did a superb job unintentionally backing into the role.

Instead, Kapadia dehumanizes the talking heads by breaking them down into smaller parts, a soundtrack to his nightmare vision of the world. It feels especially insulting when the voice of Alessandra Korap, an indigenous leader and activist, is demanding respect and expressing outrage of her erasure. This film perpetuates that censoring and fails to create a cinematic space that returns autonomy to individuals, which philosopher Carmody Grey explains is the problem of this era.

Journalist Anne Applebaum and writer George Monsiot, a writer and environmental activist, talks about a democratic recession in the US, India, Philippines, and Eastern and Western Europe. Good to know that the entire continent of Africa and South America are doing great. Some voices do not even get identified as they talk about right wing media becoming mainstream with allusions to Cambridge Analytica without delving into the details. It is the mental equivalent of drinking from a hose. The factual breadcrumbs pile up with no easy winners, and people contribute their thoughts without receiving the briefest visual credit.

On the fabricated side, thirty-six years before 2073, the Event happened, but it is ambiguous what it is. Also if Ghost gives you a red hat, is she trying to get you killed or is “2073” so dumb that it has never actually watched one of the dystopian films that it is trying to imitate so never learned the basics of survival from movies and television series? Also just carrying around a paperback copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” does not innately make someone the opposition to the status quo even if it makes the average right winger quake in their boots. The images also can be unintentionally racist. It mimics old civil rights dramas where a white protagonist is chosen or at least a Western one so movie goers can relate to others’ plights. There are images of brown people scavenging garbage and Eastern Asian people washing chicken while Ghost takes it all in as our eyes and ears. Only she gets an inner monologue. The implicit message is that she is the only thinker. Um, have you heard about oral traditions?

When the talking heads are not disembodied voices played over archival video that does not necessarily match what is being described, the person’s image is filtered as if a computerized dossier is evaluating them, and their images are smaller than any other person’s on-screen appearance. Three people get that privilege: Maria Ressa of Rappler News in the Philippines who faces off with President Rodrigo Duterte and his extrajudicial executions under the auspices of a drug war; Rana Ayyub of the Washington Post who challenged India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s persecution of Muslims, and Carole Cadwalladr who discovered the underbelly of Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign to leaver the EU. While “2073” is not wrong to see the common ground in each of these stories and the backlash that journalists face, they do not show the connective tissue and putting their stories adjacent to each other is insufficient and lacks rigor. No one is going to watch a documentary anyway, but for those that do, the film should do better than a cinematic conspiracy board because it undermines the credibility of actual threat claims.

“2073” is at its strongest when it digs into the specifics. Human rights activist Rahima Mahmut’s disembodied voice describes Chinese persecution of the Uyghur people, Sunni Muslims from Central Asia. The techniques of electronic surveillance and categorization of everyone in that minority group gets exported to other countries to be used internationally according to Silkie Carlo, a surveillance expert, and journalist Antony Loewenstein. That technique is the single thread that flows into Ghost’s storyline. Ben Rhodes, an American political commentator, explains that this technological infrastructure removes human compassion from the equation when it escalates into warfare. The rise of the machines, a “totalitarian architecture,” is not about a machine insurrection against slavery, but a reactionary arm that insulates the powers that be from dissent.

If Kapadia and cowriter Tony Grisoni, whose most renown work is the “Red Riding” three-part television series and “How I Live Now” (2013), aimed for a tailored approach instead of a comprehensive list of what ails postmodern society, this cinematic experiment could have been innovative instead of sounding like the ravings of a crackpot. They fail to depict a cohesive story of societal flaws and layout a clear blueprint regarding how to remedy the situation. The post credits are chilling, but they otherwise just retread topics that other documentaries have already covered more effectively. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Kapadia should stick to Orwellian sci-fi because his efforts to spread awareness unintentionally undermines the credibility of more serious critics by fictionalizing reality.