“Extrapolations”, life in times of climate crisis in a series on Apple TV+
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You end up getting used to everything, coming to perceive emergencies as the new normal. The scenes of daily life at the time of climate change told by Extrapolations, a series published by Apple Tv+, appear very familiar but in a context that has instead become extraordinary. We are in 2046, at least in the first episodes, and the world is changing more and more by dint of half steps forward and too many reverses on the source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Extrapolations: The Global Warming Series Isn’t Science Fiction
There is no threat of mass extinction as in Don’t Look Up or The Day After Tomorrow, there is therefore no sudden catastrophe, only the progressive entry into an era where forest fires are constant, the metropolis wrapped in orange clouds, the lack of water has become endemic, the mild temperatures at the North Pole are almost melting completely ice, coastal cities are flooded due to rising sea levels. We do what we can to live in such a context, between contradictory policies, narrow-minded bureaucracy, ever-increasing migratory flows from the south and the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP) which regularly end up with downward compromises.
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There is a background story in the series that occasionally emerges decisively during the various episodes, even if the human affairs of some characters grappling with the difficulties of their lives have been placed in the foreground. A widowed biologist, for example, who tries to collect as much data as possible on endangered species; or a young and visionary rabbi who ends up in Miami to try to save a synagogue that is regularly flooded like much of the city; the CEO of a large multinational technology company who uses every lever to profit from the situation.
Some of the faces are familiar: David Schwimmer, the Ross Geller’s Friends and Kit Harington, who in Game of Thrones played Jon Snow. And again: Sienna Miller; Peter Riegert, the Donald “Boon” Schoenstein of animal house among other things; Heather Graham. Alongside them, in each episode, stars of various sizes appear, such as Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, Tobey Maguire, Marion Cotillard.
Director Scott Z. Burns: ‘Let’s Resume Al Gore’s Lecture’
by Chiara Ugolini
The author of the series, and also director of some of the eight episodes, is Scott Z. Burns. He was the screenwriter of the film Contagion of 2011 and the manufacturer of An inconvenient truth (An Inconvenient Truth), the 2006 documentary with Al Gore on the climate crisis. Extrapolations somehow it is an emanation of it in a narrative key with many simplifications. The attribution of blame, social tensions, the opposing fronts that move on one side to find solutions and on the other to increase profits, are depicted very clearly, too perhaps.
Extrapolations however it has the advantage of depicting what could await us if the average temperatures were to approach two degrees. Scenarios that climatologists have often painted, starting with the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (Cmcc), but which in the end remained confined to the scientific sphere without ever really flowing into the imagination. Although a sudden catastrophe is more spectacular, and therefore cinematographic, we are heading towards a different fate, albeit no less dramatic. And that’s what Burns’ series tries to tell starting from everyday life. From this point of view it remembers not so much Don’t Look Up How much Soylent Green which we came out with the title 2022: the survivors. It was a 1973 science fiction film, starring Charlton Heston, set in the present day: food resources reduced to a minimum, cities attacked by the heat, overcrowding and constant riots. Luckily for us we are not at that point. Or at least, not yet.
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