Meryl Streep, Tobey Maguire lead all-star cast in Extrapolations, story of a world hit hard by climate breakdown, on Apple TV+
- Corporate greed has driven the earth to eco-apocalypse in Extrapolations, whose star-studded cast includes Gemma Chan, David Schwimmer and Forest Whitaker
- Meanwhile on Netflix, three-part documentary MH370: The Plane that Disappeared offers little new information about the flight that vanished
It would be easy to sneer at Extrapolations (Apple TV+).
The eight-part, near-future, climate-catastrophe anthology series, which concluded on Friday, starts stodgily, keeping its powder dry until a few episodes in. Then the tension rises and the emphasis shifts from cheesy emotional wrangling to more visceral action.
There is a preachiness to its ecological lessons, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong about the calamity. The tenuously linked stories capture the realities of wildfire, extreme heat, flood, famine, urban chaos and mass migration, as triggered by unstoppable corporate greed.
Elephants and tigers exist as cuddly toys only; Florida is drowning; Indian street bars sell gulps of oxygen (air is no longer free); and businessmen are planning a casino in the Arctic.
Alpha – a descendant of Alexa, but also much more – is the font of all wisdom and something to which even Edward Norton, Tobey Maguire, Meryl Streep, David Schwimmer and Marion Cotillard can’t hold a digital candle. It is, after all, part of a certain notorious billionaire’s ubiquitous footprint.
Topically, the series landed just as the Biden administration approved the Willow project, a bucolic-sounding “big oil” atrocity that will desecrate a swathe of Alaskan wilderness – and they are supposed to be the good guys.
Keeley Hawes’ ex-police officer gets caught in Crossfire on BBC First
But, as Extrapolations ironically notes, if governments continue to ignore the eco-apocalypse we will still have the power of prayer to “hypothetical deities”. And we all know how that’s worked out for us so far.
Inconvenient truth
Not to be flippant about tragedy, but the loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have already surpassed “Who killed JFK?” in conspiracy-theory lore – because so many more lives were lost and innumerable relatives left perpetually grieving.
The disappearance of the Boeing 777 and its 239 souls is not a mystery.
It is a scandal and a crime that was perpetrated in a geopolitically sensitive zone that at the time was subject to saturation radar coverage, civilian and military.
This, however, is not the line pursued in MH370: The Plane that Disappeared (Netflix).
MH370: The Plane That Disappeared – riveting if predictable Netflix series
The three-part documentary pushes the wilfully confusing official position that the aircraft changed course before heading towards the southern Indian Ocean. And because you can’t defame the dead, it also, handily, suggests that “aggressive and sophisticated” Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a suicidal mass murderer.
Convenient; except that no evidence supports the latter theory and not much the former.
As this “investigation”, full of speculation presented as fact, progresses, one starts to wonder whether certain security agencies will eventually be credited with co-authorship.
It perpetuates arguably the most extensive cover-up in aviation history – any history – until at last it briefly humours, somewhat reluctantly, a sleuth who asks awkward questions.
Credit for those goes to Hong Kong-based journalist Florence de Changy, whose 2021 book The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, alleges an astonishing, coordinated campaign of denial, obfuscation and misdirection, in which the world was convinced to look, literally, the wrong way.
Here she is allowed a handful of brief appearances, making it feel as though de Changy has been recognised merely to be dismissed, whereas ignoring her might have raised embarrassing questions as to why she hadn’t been consulted.
Her MH370 theory, implicating multiple governments in a conspiracy of silence, might seem outlandish. Nevertheless, it is supported by far more evidence, even if circumstantial, than has been offered to back up any approved, Indian Ocean narrative.
And it is that narrative, peddled here by its extensively consulted apologists, which brings so many anguished families no closer to closure.
We believe what we are told by those in charge – because they are in charge.
