In 2024, there will be no shortage of imagined dystopian futures. Not just because there is a growing body of films dreaming up humanity’s worst-case scenarios, but because news about climate catastrophes, headlines about dwindling natural resources, and well-founded fears about creeping artificial intelligence power dominate our daily lives. . Maybe that’s what makes “Aire, Just Breathe” by Leticia Tonos such a hit Both incredibly timely and decidedly familiar. The Dominican sci-fi film is a stark vision of a devastated future that, while visually striking, remains too hollow and cerebral to fully pack an emotional punch.
The year is 2147 and Tanya (Sophie Gayle) has learned to live on her own. She wakes up every day and tends to the few plants she can in the underground bunker she has come to call home. Despite not having contact with any other human beings for a long time (she may be the sole survivor of what we’re told was the Great Chemical War that drove humanity to near-extinction), Tanya is committed to trying to help life find a safe haven. road. Along with her trusty AI, called Vida aka “Life” (voiced by Paz Vega), Tania engages in some reproductive experiments that may help her conceive a child. There is boredom and exhaustion in her daily chores, and her hope is now tied to the absolute monotony of her isolated daily life. Only Veda gives her world any kind of texture.
Lest you think Vida is nothing more than a voice, this AI character is presented visually as an illuminated circle (if you’re thinking of HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you’re not far off) on the front of a large-scale facial sculpt. There’s a primitivism associated with its futurism: In fact, it refuses to call itself an artificial intelligence, referring to itself instead as a “creative intelligence system” that learns not just from files and written sources, but from Tanya’s own behaviors – from years And for years now, it seems that the two have been working as one, driven by their ambition to keep Tanya alive and make her a mother figure for humanity to come.
Their carefully ordered world comes to a standstill when a mysterious man named Azarias (Galsen Santana) shows up at the hideout. Is he a friend or an enemy? Is it a harbinger of hope or an unwelcome death knell? Will he help build a better future or is he there to break free from what has long passed? The answers to these questions unfold systematically as Tonos transforms “Aire, Just Breathe” into a three-player game grounded in the eternal query about what it means to survive—and what it might take to do so.
Whereas Tanya Gayle is tightly wound (almost robotic) in her demeanor, Azarias Santana is looser and warmer. The schematic way in which they trace the choice between trusting technology or embracing nature’s song dominates their interactions. When Vida begins acting on Tanya’s stated directive that the two don’t need anyone else, their future (and the future of humanity) becomes more at risk – all while the high winds, hostile storms, and noxious atmosphere above make their world harsher than ever. Them both.
With a brutal production design that recalls the harsh environment in which Tanya sought refuge as a means of survival, “Aire, Just Breathe” is a desolate vision of the future, one in which color has been drained. The tiny greenery she grows in her quaint greenhouse pales against the majestic cavernous spaces she enters and exits on any given day.
There is an unfeeling aesthetic to both the film and the space. Azarias’s arrival, and his conviction that there might be a future abroad—perhaps at sea—seems like an affront to what Tania and Vida have been building, to their shared coexistence. He is dirty and embodied in a way that Tanya never wanted or could not be. Aesthetically, this sci-fi film may borrow well-known iconic images (not just Kubrick’s artificial intelligence, but also films like “Dune”). “Blade Runner” and “Interstellar”). But it reframes some of its themes toward pressing concerns that begin to feel less like dystopian nightmares and more like present-day emergencies.
Tonus has created a truly barren world. Raging rainstorms play the backdrop to dramatic scenes where you’re genuinely concerned about the survival of the film’s characters. The air surrounding Tanya and Azarias could spell doom for both of them. Which is why keeping Vida connected to the Internet and in charge of the technology that filters the air in the bunker becomes a major concern throughout the film. Although it may seem fresh in the canon of Caribbean films, “Aire, Just Breathe” sticks to well-worn tropes — especially when it eventually leans toward a somewhat predictable and somewhat boring third act. Tonos’s beautifully art-directed film is most interesting and insightful as a condemnation of technology-enabled climate disasters, a message as hackneyed as it is and, perhaps even in 2024, all the more necessary.