★★½              By Pavita Millimuff                September 22, 2090

The Tomorrow Syndicate has a lot of ideas. It may have too many ideas. This is a film that is at once a science fiction action blockbuster, a high drama, an experimental visual poem, an allegory for the journey of the human race, a revolutionary rallying cry, and a deeply personal reflection on a life in the cinema. At least, it tries to be all those things at once. It never fully reaches that point, though, instead only half-accomplishing a few sporadically as it desperately tries to juggle all that it hopes to be. That the film is anything more than total nonsense is something of a miracle. That the film falls short of its aspirations is inevitable.

The film is the product of what has to be decades of thinking from its writer/director/producer Nathan Durdiskes, who has not made a film, at least not one that has had a theatrical release, in 27 years. Younger audiences might be surprised to learn after watching the film’s obtuse and ineffective attempts at social commentary and cast of 20-year-olds speaking with the dialect of medieval scholars that Mr. Durdiskes was once a highly influential figure in Earth’s cinema. In fact, he was for a time as influential a figure in cinema as there ever was, with his prime in the 2040s leading to lines spanning several blocks to see a film he made about fish that was a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic (The Waters of Passion and Negligence, for those interested) and later to his being awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. His career came to an apparent end with his abrupt retirement in 2063 following his film Snuff Queen, but many now believe it was a forced retirement, and that Mr. Durdiskes was blacklisted by the major studios after threatening to release evidence of major executives’ sexual crimes. But times have changed, and Mr. Durdiskes, now 89 years old, is back with a film he has been crafting for much of his time away, an apparent final statement on his career, the cinema, and the world at large.

Describing the film’s plot, I can practically hear Mr. Durdiskes excitedly pitching it to a confused financer. “Okay, so the movie is about a gang whose product is running wild, to the point that they’ve become one of the most powerful organizations in the world. But what are they selling? Drugs? Weapons? No, not that, you’ve gotta think bigger. They’re selling … wait for it … the future.” At this point the person with the money probably says something like, “But that’s a metaphor, right? What are they actually selling?” And then Durdiskes responds, “No, they’re literally selling the future! They’re spreading the idea that at some point soon there’s gonna be some kind of rapture, and the future is going to be closed off. And if you want to continue existing past that point, you need to buy your stake in the future. You buy one of their shares in the future and then you have total ownership over that amount of time, and when the rapture happens, if you have a share, then you can do anything you want with that time, but if you don’t have a share, then you’re not going to be allowed into the future.” Then the financer starts, “I’m confused…” but it’s already too late, because Durdiskes is on a roll now and there’s no stopping him. “So think about what this will do to the world!” he goes on, “Billionaires are buying enough shares to make them immortal, and the poor are going into gladiatorial combat to try to win themselves a single share, and there are shrimp everywhere! Shrimp has become the main currency of Earth, and the neo-God, the one whose face you see everywhere, who has replaced all the old ones, is Pedro Pascal!” And then the financer says, “Pedro Pascal? That old-timey actor who was in everything for a minute like 70 years ago?” And Durdiskes says, “Yeah, him! I mean, it’s so obvious. He has to be the God because,” and then he pauses for a second and says, “Well, I know there was some reason I had for why he was the new God. Anyway, because there are shrimp everywhere, people who have seafood allergies are in a lower caste…” and he just keeps going on and on, and the financer is so lost that he somehow ends up opening the checkbook and giving Mr. Durdiskes twenty million dollars without realizing it.

So yes, this is the grand concept Nathan Durdiskes has conceived for The Tomorrow Syndicate: a powerful gang that is selling the future. This is both obviously a metaphor and also somehow literal. Having the future as a literal commodity to be bought and sold is as transparent a criticism of capitalism as one can imagine, where one’s very right to exist has become a function of their wealth. But the film wants to go deeper than such a superficial critique. It is equally concerned with the intertwining notions of faith, generational strife, and artistic expression. The film’s eponymous syndicate functions as a cult as much as it does a cartel; it borrows its iconography from the Mars Truthers as much as it does from Chombos 29. They preach about an imminent day of reckoning to cause a mass panic, and then sell their product as the only solution. Business becomes religion and religion becomes business; the dollar is the only God there is in this world (apart from Pedro Pascal). But the Tomorrow Syndicate’s stakes of the future succeed for reasons beyond the religious panic they create, they also fill a desire already possessed by the powerful of the world. It is well-known that the rich and the old tend to become obsessed with legacy, and they do so because of their terror of seeing the world move past them, out of their hands and into those of the younger. The shares of the future they buy give them a way to stop this process. The world can literally be theirs for as long as the money keeps flowing. The Tomorrow Syndicate guarantees that those in power will never be forced to give it up. This all has personal connection to Mr. Durdiskes, too, as an octogenarian filmmaker reckoning with the future of the cinema after he is gone. The entire concept of the film, then, seems in one respect to be a reflection by a filmmaker in the twilight of his life and his career on what happens going forward, and an attempt to try to let go his own attachment to it.

This is the idea at least, as far as I can surmise. The actual execution of the film would hardly lead one directly towards such conclusions without their desperately trying to grasp for any meaning to be found. The core of the film, in its exploration of power structures and how they cycle through time, is there, but it is clouded by so many other bewildering ideas that it gets drowned out. I still have no idea what the deal with all the shrimp is. I do not understand why the film is shot with such extreme lenses, or whether there is a purpose to all the rock bands in bondage gear performing in the film beyond musical interludes. The fact that Mr. Durdiskes has been conjuring this film up for almost 30 years is ultimately a detriment, because it means the film is so crowded with all the machinations such a mind produces in that time that no one aspect of the film has room to breathe, and everything ends up being so much more aesthetically and thematically complicated that it needs to be. I have no doubt that in the head of Mr. Durdiskes, where the neural pathways that connect all the elements of this film have been well-established, this all makes perfect sense. But in the practice of putting his staggering volume of ideas on screen in a way that is intelligible to anyone else, he has largely failed.

There is an unavoidable irony to this film, in the conflict between what it hopes to communicate and the nature of its existence. As mentioned above, a major part of the film is the exploration of the passage of power between generations, and the unwillingness of the older, more powerful generations, to recognize when their time has passed and cede to the younger people. As such, the film for Mr. Durdiskes stands as a coming to terms with the movement of cinema beyond him, and a passing of the torch to new filmmakers with new ideas. Yet this film itself is a demonstration of exactly the same kind of clutching onto power that it criticizes. What Mr. Durdiskes apparently fails to realize is that he is not with this film ceding his influence to the next generation of filmmakers, his influence has already long since faded. The release of such a massive, bombastic film with his name dominating the top of the poster comes across as a vain attempt to convince himself that he is still in the glory days, that he is still one of the most important filmmakers in the world. But movies have already moved past him, and he now stands clutching onto his lost power, hoping that this film will prove both to others and himself that he is still on top of the world. Nathan Durdiskes might like to believe that this is his 9^th Symphony, a magnum opus on which to end his career which will take him from a superstar of years past into a cinematic legend. But the image I see is Mr. Durdiskes as Norma Desmond of the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, deluding himself into thinking the world desperately awaits his comeback, insistent that he is big, it’s the pictures that got small.

This is probably too harsh an assessment of the film, and perhaps the characterization I give of its principal creator is inappropriate. There is still much to admire about this film, and the effort put forward by Mr. Durdiskes to pour all the creative juice he has left into one giant, sincere project to offer to the world should not be taken lightly. It would have been much easier for him to just give up on the movies after his abrupt retirement, but he chose instead to make this film. It may perhaps give him a rude awakening about his current status in the world of film, but I have no doubt that the project was undertaken from the sincerest striving towards great art. The Tomorrow Syndicate will not change the world as Nathan Durdiskes seems to think it will, but I still hope people see it, if only to get introduced to a figure who once represented the true pinnacle of the art form. Nathan Durdiskes is a figure to be celebrated in cinematic history, but that figure is one that is, and shall remain, in the past.