Director: Guy Moshe
103 minutes (15) 2020
Dazzler Blu-ray
Rating: 7/10
Review by Steven Hampton
From the maker of lavishly visualised martial-arts adventure Bunraku (2010), this sci-fi movie is equally colourful as stylish soap opera, bordering on kitsch of a genre sit-com. Depressed nervy tech-broker Adam (James D’Arcy, Stark’s butler Jarvis in Agent Carter) struggles to cope with medical shock of his impending demise, while trying for a reunion with estranged wife Reena (Anna Brewster). His life insurance Premium 3 offers solution of a GM-clone replacement after death for his bereaved, perhaps aggrieved, spouse who can alter his replica-drone version to please her, as favoured, if not best, doppelganger.
LX 2048 delivers four-star wraparound futurism within a nocturnal dystopia, where toxic sunshine means largely binary civilisation stratified for vampire-shift workers. Inhumanly efficient coping mechanisms present life as socially distanced enough that daylight-world decay is prompting social migration from retro virtuality to upload existence only on data chips. Rejected scientist Donald Stein (Delroy Lindo) entering distraught Adam’s morality role-play for an intervention. Notable guest cameos include the smart casting of Juliet Aubrey (Primeval), and Gina McKee (Wonderland), before the tragic fatality and theatricality of third-act revelations. When Adam meets his new and improved self, one of them should die... but which one is more likely to commit murder?
Partly a variation of E.M. Forster’s classic story The Machine Stops (1909), this is filtered through a distorting lens ground into copycat macro-focus from liquid-crystalline notions in Philip K. Dick’s work. Here, though, familiar phildickian themes mesh with concerns of J.G. Ballard, and post-cyberpunk William Gibson, but often using ideas not really derived from their books. Instead, writer-director Guy Moshe skims off inspiration from Impostor (2001), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), for basic tones and finely wrought style, so that LX 2048 sometimes feels like the best kind of PKD fan-fiction. Possibilities of immortality, and the promise of dreamscape avatars incarnated as replicants, form intrigues here and enable levels of complexity while a timely narrative is unfolding. Adam’s ranting in VR-goggles suggests a stage-play basis for this philosophical, and ultimately satirical, melodrama about identity and transcendence, but filmic quality emerges from a combination of D’Arcy’s excellent performance and the SF noir moods of Moshe’s astute vision.
