2067

Thankfully, Smit-McPhee is mostly in great form, and his intense, haunted performance is enough to carry things over the line.

It all looks great, with outstanding photography by Earle Dresner. But 2067 gets bogged down with the sort of time-shifting debate beloved of many sci-fi buffs.

"All good art is political," the author Toni Morrison famously noted. A great deal of not-so-good art is political too; this film explicitly so.

Despite the too-twisty story and drippy characters, Larney does extremely impressive work with a limited budget, creating an entire world (or two) as if he had the resources of a Marvel escapade, or at the very least a Terminator entry.

You can tell "2067" has some rather lofty aspirations. But its ways of realizing them are too frequently pedestrian, from the banal dialogue to the notion that our savior might ultimately need reassuring that daddy really loved him.

Larney fails his own idea by not having a stronger edit on his dialogue and a more confident hand when it comes to directing performance.

2067 may not innovate in the field of ecological dystopian films, but its subject matter feels, sadly, evergreen.

Can't invest its characters with enough reason to be in either its own future or the future inside its future.

The problem is the story; it's a very thin tale, one that would have made a great short film. Alas the narrative is stretched to snapping point and the viewer ends up more than a little bored.

It serves as another misfire for a "hero's journey" space film.