Title:
Z.P.G. aka Z.P.G. Zero Population Growth
What Year?:
1972
Classification:
Irreproducible Oddity
Rating:
Dear God WHY??!! (1/5)
As I write this, I’m at the point where I’m very seriously considering wrapping up this feature for good. I have also been putting thought into the “random” lineup (really begun with Mighty Peking Man), which very quickly brought me to one I have had in mind on and off for a very long time. As I pretty much expected, it’s from the 1970s. More specifically, it’s part of a minor wave of movies spawned by the most notorious panic of the 1960s and early 1970s, the overpopulation scare. It’s a field with several infamous cult classics, but the one I find representative of the whole is the one that has remained relatively obscure. Here is Z.P.G., a movie where the government has banned having kids, and the filmmakers can’t quite bring themselves to say it’s a bad idea.
Our story begins with scenes of a city shrouded in pollution, where ordinary citizens must wear face masks to go outside without ill effects. We then get a series of narrations revealing that the world government has decided that the cause of it all is too many people, and the only solution is to prohibit anyone from having children for a period of 30 years. If you’re asking how they could possibly enforce this, we then see a representative family of offenders chased down and surrounded by a mob who apparently buy the state propaganda line, before being put to death with an airtight dome dropped on them from above. We then meet a completely uninteresting couple who consider adopting what we can safely assume to be a homicidal murder bot as an alternative to actual children. After justifiably refusing, the woman finally defies the state by literally not pushing a button, and the pair get by undetected. Things get riskier, however, as the mother-to-be approaches term and the state becomes suspicious. But the greatest danger may come from a neighboring couple who want the baby for their own!
Z.P.G., sometimes spelled out Zero Population Growth, was a Danish-American production directed by Michael Campus from a script by Frank De Felitta and Max Ehrlich. It was part of a wave of science fiction influenced to various degrees by The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (evidently unrelated to the screenwriter), which predicted that overpopulation would cause global famine by the end of the 20th century. The film starred English stage actor Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin, a child of the silent actor, with Diane Cliento as the neurotic neighbor Edna. Robotic child substitutes shown in the film were provided by Derek Meddings, who previously created the marionettes for Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds among other productions. Max Ehrlich adapted the script into a novel, The Edict, ultimately published a year before the movie’s release. The actual organization Zero Population Growth (now known as Population Connection) took significant steps to either condemn the film or deny any association with it. The movie is currently available for digital purchase on multiple platforms, but is not offered for rental.
For my personal experiences, the overpopulation craze has long been my major beef with 1970s sci fi in general. What made this movie stand out as soon as I first heard of it was the total lack of nuance. Forget the comical failure of laws against birth control, or the pointless atrocities of eugenics. Forget admittedly desirable limits on family size, like China eventually tried to implement. Forget using genetic tests to identify defects or potentially “superior” traits. Forget even artificial environments where space and resources might be limited, like Logan’s Run or Silent Running. This movie posits no babies, period, for a completely arbitrary period. I knew this one was worth special attention, once I could find a way to view it without actually paying anything. When I started this lineup, I ran it down and viewed it even before another movie I reviewed, and it was even more irritating than I might have expected.
Moving on to the movie, the core irony is that from the very beginning, the Earth of this movie’s future is even more hopeless than the voices of authority admit, a common denominator with Silent Running. The atmosphere is nearly unbreathable, free-living animal life is apparently extinct, and food production is dependent on synthetics. Given this scenario, the surviving populace might well be seriously overcrowded, but that could be no more than a symptom of much bigger problems. What quickly gets stranger is that the movie ignores actual reproductive medicine. Nothing is said of pharmaceutical contraceptives or implants, of which the latter could easily head off situations like the movie portrays. Even more problematically, there is no recognition whatsoever of cloning, fertility treatments, artificial insemination or egg freezing, any combination of which could allow those with means and patience to wait out the “edict”. And, as in Logan’s Run, there’s a clear risk of a flat backfire. 30 years without new births might buy enough time to do something about other issues, but what are you going to do when billions of women on the brink of menopause all demand their undisputed right to have a baby now?
Something further I’m going long to add here is that movies like this are singularly bad at actually portraying starvation, poverty or even overcrowding. That in itself should be an editorial enough on the extent to which the overpopulation “crisis” was an uninformed projection of the wealthy onto the poor. By the standards of the actual “developing” world, just having no more than two people in one bedroom is a relative luxury (a point I’ve been annoyed enough to bring up when multigenerational households are discussed). Yet, nobody here thought it was odd for an attractive, healthy-looking couple to have an entire apartment to themselves. I bring this up at this length because there’s plenty more evidence that poverty and malnutrition harm fertility in every measurable way, to the point that knowledgeable authorities are worried about “premature” puberty in the western/ industrial world (something I covered when I wrote about leuprolide- once). The fact that there are still starving children elsewhere simply proves that this has far more to do with politics than it ever did with population.
The still deeper problem is that this level of overanalysis is only sustainable because the movie simply cannot make the viewer care about anyone onscreen. For all its problems, Logan’s Run at least made its characters and their society interesting, complete with an atmosphere of decadent grandeur and ephemeral beauty. Here, everyone from the stars to the extras are uniformly bland in personality and appearance, compounded by the plain and nearly asexual costumes that add an especially uncomfortable Puritanical subtext to the proceedings. By the time the deus ex machina ending rolls through, one could second-guess whether it is “really” happening or just a last hallucination of the dying, but you still will be hard-pressed to care. The one character who is at least a little interesting is Edna, alternately entranced by the baby and coldly threatening to anyone else who gets in the way. It’s easy to pity her as both a victim and creation of the alleged World Government’s policies. Then again, it’s way too easy to envision her as the kind of mother who wouldn’t let her own kid go to the little boys’ room without fretting that a human trafficker climbed out of the toilet and pulled him in.
For the one “scene”, I’m going with literally the only sequence I didn’t find predictable (and inexplicably, it doesn’t include the uncanny-valley robot babies). It happens to have come right at the transition between two online videos I had to use for the viewing, which made the impression stronger. At a bit past the midpoint, the expectant father does a search for information on childbirth at a sort of library terminal that seems to approximate the internet. As he reads the entry that appears, which for some reason begins by quoting Augustine, his chair is literally pulled through the wall into a forbidding side chamber. A voice that could be broadcast, recorded or a form of AI firmly demands an explanation why he looked up the page. He manages to spin a story that he meant to search another term, at which point the interrogator presses him why he didn’t redo the search. He counters with moral indignation, questioning why the state would archive such “filth”. It’s enough to be released, but someone is clearly suspicious. It’s a chilling preview of the problems of online privacy and the combined threats of authoritarian governments and corporate Big Tech. In this movie, however, it’s like a fly in amber, trapped by self-dated production values and even more outdated political talking points.
In closing, I am going
with a rant I started to go into earlier in this review. The final verdict on
this movie is that it feels like something that should have been a joke.
Indeed, it would have been a promising satire, especially if it had made the
comparison between the plight of the protagonists and the obstacles that advocates
of contraceptives and abortion had faced. Instead, we have a movie that
approaches reproductive rights with the same shallowness and breathless hypocrisy
that as a bad slasher movie would bring to sex.
Ultimately, it pretends to side with the underdog, but still won’t say
that what they’re put through is not only wrong but probably irrational even on
the story’s terms. My diagnosis is that this is because a certain segment of alarmists
refused to fall out of love with the vile daydream that was eugenics. If
there’s one thing worse than a bad movie that wastes a good premise, it’s a bad
movie with worse politics. By that standard, this movie is truly the bottom of
the barrel. While it’s too late to wish it didn’t exist, I’m happy enough to
warn anyone else away from it.
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