Christian Frei’s Genesis 2.0 abounds in fascinating subject matter, which the filmmaker rushes through with the haphazard eagerness of a student who’s trying to finish an exam in time. Almost entirely composed of exposition, the documentary feels as if it’s constantly starting all over again, hopping from one undigested high concept to another. Its central conceit, which contrasts the exploitation of blue-collar workers with the posh entitlement of a cabal of global intellectuals, is particularly vague—a theory devoid of flesh and blood.
Notions of survival and obsession drive and more or less unite Genesis 2.0’s narrative threads. In the New Siberian Islands north of Russia, hunters search jagged landscapes for prehistoric mammoth tusks that are hidden underneath the permafrost. Maxim Arbugaev, who’s credited here as co-director and cinematographer of the New Siberian Islands sequences, bonds with the hunters while keeping correspondence with Frei, who in turn films a synthetic biology competition in Boston, where eager young students regard geneticist, chemist, and molecular engineer George M. Church as a rock star.
Frei doesn’t initially reveal how these scenarios even belong in the same production, and Genesis 2.0 benefits from this mystery, evocatively cross-associating the plains of the New Siberian Islands with futurist notions of humankind taking control of its own evolution. At times, Frei seems to be unearthing a kind of found planetary life cycle, in which the death of one species is rhymed with the potential rebirth of another.
Frei eventually reveals a literal connection between the mammoth hunters and the scientists who strive to digitize our genes, the latter a goal that has sinister connotations, especially when Frei travels to China to visit BGI, a genome sequencing center. One of the mammoth hunters, Peter Grigoriev, often framed by Arbugaev in predictably taciturn poses, has a brother, Semyon, who runs a mammoth museum and is desperate to clone one of the animals. Semyon visits BGI with more skeptical intellectuals, as well as the South Korean laboratory of discredited scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who’s cloning dogs. Just when Genesis 2.0 appears to be cohering as a narrative, Frei confusingly cuts to a flashback of Peter and Semyon discovering a nearly intact mammoth carcass. Though thrilling on its own terms, and important to uniting the film’s dual threads, this footage initially appears to come out of nowhere, taking the film backward right when it should be leaping forward.
The theoretical core of Genesis 2.0 is the relationship between Peter and Semyon, which embodies the difference between a pitilessly primordial past and a harsh future where we engineer and survey our own bodies for perfection. But the brothers’ relationship isn’t plumbed, as Frei isn’t interested in them as human beings, only as respective signifiers of instinct and intellect, as well as of the class differences between people who live by their hands and those who live by their minds. This failure of empathy, coupled with Frei’s refusal to critique the exploitive methods of the hunters as well as the scientists, leaves a void at Genesis 2.0’s center, rendering it merely a collection of factoids and unfinished sketches. (One hunter, for instance, appears to be losing his mind, which is treated as an afterthought.)
Frei’s craftsmanship and studious faux neutrality are so smooth and blandly unremarkable that it comes as a shock and a relief when a Swedish-American intellectual questions the potential fascist connotations of BGI, which stops a sycophant dead in her tracks. Isn’t genome sequencing potentially another way for governments to invade our privacy and place us into classist boxes? (The Chinese government doesn’t exactly have credibility in the human rights department.) Apart from a foreboding epilogue, Frei neither affirms nor refutes this line of questioning, and he doesn’t satirize the quixotic entitlement of people who’re trying to clone a dead elephant while the world inches closer toward cataclysm. Genesis 2.0 contains a variety of remarkable images but little actual poetry, and the documentary’s poker-faced gentility suggests a failure of moral and intellectual nerve.
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