It Means I Am More Alive

It Means I Am More Alive

World of tomorrow is a 16 minute short film, currently available on Vimeo and Netflix that explores what makes us human through an absurd lens of the distant future.

The film follows Emily, a young child of the age where she is far too naive and innocent to understand much of what is going on around her during the short film. Many of her lines were just taken candidly from conversation with the creator’s four year old niece without her knowledge, allowing the creator to throw together different snippets and try and assemble it into a narrative. As a result, she does not have much to add in conversation, but heaps to offer in tone and perspective.

Emily is contacted from the future, by a future iteration to herself and explained that in the future, everyone has their memories put into young clones of themselves (from here on out, to avoid confusion I will be calling them “Emily Prime” and “Emily Three” respectively). This “third generation Emily” is then a copy of a copy, and the just like a xerox, suffers from diminishing returns. This mental deterioration serves as one of the film’s most poignant topics, as it means she does not have full emotional capabilities, but still feels a sense of longing for something that she can’t quite remember. By the end of the film, we will see that despite her shortcomings, she is no less human for them.

World of Tomorrow has an obsession with nostalgia and memories, yet Emily Three has a sense of adolescence to her. In the beginning of the film, Emily Three tells stories of her romantic life to Emily Prime. Of how she fell in love with a moon rock because it was pretty, then a fuel pump, and an alien that followed her around and shouted unintelligible things for three years (we’ve all been in that relationship). Though this is unrealistic and absurd, because of what the viewer has come to expect from World of Tomorrow, it is vaguely relatable. Everyone has memories of a few messy relationships before they found who they were looking for.

And who Emily eventually found was a clone of “Dave”. “Dave” was an exhibit at a museum where Emily used to work. There was a living clone of a human without a brain that lived out there who life on display. As with the theme in World of Tomorrow, true compassion is set in something nostalgic and familiar. Of course the Dave that she falls in love with was an actual clone with a brain.

The absurd tragedy stems out into all aspects of World of Tomorrow. The futuristic setting itself is a tragic dystopia, but in such a way that comes off as darkly comedic. For example, before the world ends, many people are trying to use “discount time travel” to escape their fate. Most of them end up orbiting the earth in outer space and burning up the atmosphere. In once scene, the young and innocent Emily Prime remarks that the sky looks pretty, as Emily Three tries to explain to her that they are dead bodies.

The absurd realities of this new future in combination with the deadpan delivery of Emily Three’s lines help to make light of a lot of other dark elements in the show. Like the reading of depressed poetry is sent in from solar powered robots on the moon that fear the dark, or the tortured letters she gets from her grandfather, whose consciousness is trapped inside of a cube.

There are many interesting ideas displayed in the short run time of World of Tomorrow, inspired by early sci-fi pulp works similar to the twilight zone, yet no one idea gets too bogged down by anything else, as none really take center stage. This provides a quick flow of interesting concepts to be explored by the two perspectives of the Emilies, usually giving us a little insight and maybe a laugh or two.

At the end, World of Tomorrow leaves the viewer with a lesson about not letting time get away from them, to appreciate the now before it is the past, and not waste moments on pettiness. It also offers a compelling absurdist view at humanity and the importance of emotion in an alien landscape.