“Extrapolations”: a shocking series on global warming

What will happen if the temperature curve of our planet continues to climb? This is the crucial question that this disaster series by Scott Z. Burns, the screenwriter of “Contagion” by Steven Soderbergh, a visionary film which in 2011 recounted the devastation caused by a deadly virus of animal origin, tries to answer.

The virus here is the emission of greenhouse gases which ends up suffocating men but also industrialists who put their financial interests well before the general interest and politicians who prefer to temporize rather than take decisions unpopular as seen with Joe Biden’s decision to authorize a new oil project in Alaska.

More anthology than soap opera, the series unfolds between 2037 and 2070. Each episode focuses on a theme by seeking to avoid, without always succeeding, didacticism: fires, floods, migrations, carbon capture, health… Thus, takes We are well aware that at more than two degrees of warming, the planet will become partly unbreathable, that population movements will increase tenfold and that many animal species will have disappeared.

“Digitizing Your Consciousness”

To reinforce the scope of his remarks, Scott Z. Burns has surrounded himself with a very high-level cast: Meryl Streep, Kit Harington, Edward Norton, Tahar Rahim, Matthew Rhys, etc. All invested in their character. Like Marion Cotillard, dazzling as an angry wife who has just learned that her husband (Forest Whitaker) has decided to leave her to “digitize his consciousness” and reincarnate later…

Not all episodes are created equal. The first introduces too many patterns. The second turns out to be the most poetic. It tells how an “archivist” biologist (Sienna Miller) communicates with the last humpback whale and tries to save it when she discovers the dark plans of her employer, the very cynical Nicholas Bilton, the founder of the ubiquitous multinational Alpha…

Each work of anticipation now seems to have its big tech boss listened to by the powerful, as in “Don’t Look Up”. It’s Kit Harington who plays the demiurge here, at the head of a mix of Alphabet, Tesla and Alexa. This is the most caricatural aspect of the series as he seems the only entrepreneur on the planet able to find the solution to the problem of global warming (thanks to geo-engineering) and especially when to implement it… Is- is this really how the world turns?