A.k.a Zero Population Growth
D: Michael Campus. S: Max Erlich, Frank de Felitta. P: Thomas F. Madigan. Cast: Oliver Reed, Geraldine Chaplin, Diane Cilento, Don Gordon, Bill Nagy. US dist (DVD): Legend Films.
An outstandingly dour and tedious checklist of dystopian clichés filched from Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury (for starters). In the not-so-distant future, decades of industrial pollution have left the world an oxygen-depleted, smog-shrouded, shagged-out mess. Mass extinctions and scarcity of resources leave Earth’s government with only one option: to ban its citizens from reproducing, on pain of death, for the next thirty years. To compensate for the lack of kiddies, the government encourages empty promiscuity, installing handy abortion machines in every bathroom to dole out embryo-vaporizing radiation at the touch of a button. Couples are further encouraged to sublimate their dreams of parentage by queuing at the BabyShop, where smiling functionaries hand out creepy child automata programmed to squawk out a handful of reassuring pre-recorded phrases (“You’re my mummy!”).
Meet model citizens Russ (Oliver Reed) and Carole (Geraldine Chaplin). They work as actors at the local museum, recreating scenes of typical 1970s domestic life for applauding simpletons. (Also on offer: shrines to extinct species – stuffed cats, dogs, bunnies – and propaganda films decrying the criminal negligence of bad-old-days governments, in failing to curb corporate excess.) Horrified by the artificiality of the BabyShop’s child-droids, Carole secretly lets herself fall pregnant. Initially appalled by her recklessness, Russ quickly comes round to her tyrannical earth-mother loopiness and they concoct a story to cover her period of confinement, in the abandoned nuke shelter under the house. Nine months later and (inevitably) their secret is discovered, by their wife-swapping neighbours; they agree to keep the child’s existence to themselves, but there’s a price for their silence. They want the kid for themselves.
Long story short: the pair allow themselves to be arrested by the authorities and sentenced to death-by-gas-chamber, but don’t worry – Russ has a plan. He’s already tunnelled from the family bomb shelter directly underneath Execution Square; once they’re imprisoned inside the killing dome (which is then handily sprayed in red paint, so nobody can see what’s happening inside), he pulls out a trusty spork from his wellie and starts digging. And with a single bound – and a lengthy sea voyage by rubber dinghy – the family is free, free to live out their lives as God intended…in an irradiated Forbidden Zone. Er, hooray.
A handful of okay Derek Meddings miniatures (modest cityscape of smoke-festooned towerblocks, a hovering tannoy like a mini-Death Star, a Chinook-style transport craft which delivers the Execution Domes) give ZPG the feel of a Gerry Anderson show hijacked by suicidal hippies running low on lithium. Only a few odds and ends stick in the mind: the eerie doll-children (evoking memories of the steel-toothed manikins in Barbarella), and the big-screen TVs with their home shopping network (whose smarmy salesmen are liable to offer themselves, if they can’t sell you a fridge) and piped-in psychiatry service (hypnotising broody malcontents with Blofeld-style coloured lights into accepting their childless lot). Beyond that, it’s dullsville all the way.
ZPG’s chief problem is ZDD: zero dramatic development. Once the setup has been described, there’s just nowhere for it to go. There are no real villains, beyond the supposedly “heroic” babymakers themselves. It’s hard to sympathise with this pair, or their sense of self-righteous entitlement: their single-minded need to reproduce, when the world around them is clearly gasping its last, seems merely selfish. Add to that the total absence of chemistry between Reed and Chaplin, and their dilemma becomes especially uninvolving. Between them they exude as much passion as a wet Wednesday afternoon: Ollie doing his Moody Two number, while Geri mopes and quivers with pent-up neurosis. Will they thwart Big Brother? Who cares?
At least “In The Year 2525” lasts only three-and-a-half minutes; ZPG runs for 96, and seems longer. ZPG presumes to lecture us about corporate irresponsibility, while applauding personal irresponsibility (so long as it involves, y’know, babies and flowers and sticking it to The Man). ZPG’s message is this: biological imperatives trump all ethical considerations, so you may as well give into them and screw everyone else. It is dismal, stupid, derivative and boring. Post-apocalypse completists will be unable to resist; those not so afflicted should count themselves lucky.