Genesis 2.0 (2018)

Directed by: Christian Frei, Maxim Arbugaev | 113 minutes | documentary | Starring: Maxim Arbugaev, Christian Frei, Peter Grigoriev, Semyon Grigoriev, Woo Suk Hwang

What would it be like if we could bring extinct species back to life and recreate life on Earth entirely according to our wishes and needs? For a long time, such questions seemed little more than fodder for imaginative science fiction writers (see ‘Jurassic Park’). But with the rise and growth of synthetic biology, scientists have more and more opportunities to design and modify living things. Just like the mechanization of production processes and the revolutionary development of information technology, synthetic biology also has the potential to drastically change the world in which we live.

The illustrious mammoth forms the basis for the documentary ‘Genesis 2.0’. The fun and original thing is that the film by the Swiss Christan Frei connects two opposing worlds. On the one hand, we follow a group of hardy men who travel every season to the inhospitable New Siberian Islands to search for mammoth tusks in the receding permafrost. An expedition not suitable for the faint of heart and soft bodies. The fossil hunters operate under harsh conditions and often stand knee-high in the mud as they uncover the mammoth bones with their picks, skewers and axes. They sleep in modest tents, with the only distraction from the limited use of their smartphones and a thermos with hot drink. The boat trip back, over a swirling Arctic Ocean, is also one that puts one’s own life at risk. The fact that only large and intact tusks bring in serious money (the disappointment is audible when the fossil hunters dig up yet another damaged specimen) and that most of the profits are made by middlemen, makes the fate of the ‘mammoth men’ even less enviable. It’s also interesting to learn that they do the work purely for survival. The fact that it is actually ‘not done’ within their own culture to excavate mammoth remains (finding a tusk would be a bad omen and a harbinger of death and doom) further illustrates how hard the fossil hunters use the income from their diligent search and excavation work.

The adventures of the ivory seekers are the visually most attractive part of ‘Genesis 2.0′. The magnificent cinematography of co-director Maxim Arbugaev exposes the inhospitable nature of the New Siberian Islands. The landscape looks primordial and hostile, as do the turbulent waves that surround it. Wonderfully beautiful, gloomy, untamed and irreconcilable at the same time. Arbugaev knows how to capture the ferocity of the elements, a force of nature that we as humans have not yet managed to tame, beautifully in images and directly link it to the human story of the Siberian tusk hunters.

The environment in which the fossil hunters operate is in stark contrast to the high-tech centers and sterile research labs that set the stage for the other side of the story. The direct link between the expedition work in Siberia and the expanding scientific field of genetic engineering is made by Semyon Grigoriev, head of the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk and the brother of one of the tusk hunters portrayed. Grigoriev’s life dream is to one day clone a mammoth and welcome this iconic species back into the realm of the living. As part of that mission, he takes the viewer along pioneering institutes such as South Korea’s Sooam Biotech (specialized in dog cloning), the Beijing Genomics Institute and the China National GeneBank. Visually, the recordings in the cloning pioneers’ labs are less interesting than the adventures of the Siberian fossil hunters. That is not surprising, of course, because petri dishes and microscopes simply provide less spectacle than the pristine elements or the occasional visits of polar bears and arctic foxes.

The section dealing with genetic engineering, on the other hand, does raise interesting, urgent and precarious ethical issues. One of the Chinese scientists, for example, states that ‘by working together we can finally make God perfect’, while one of his female colleagues proudly postulates that the ability to detect a genetic disorder such as Down syndrome at an early stage ‘may cause such babies will not be born in the future’. When an American researcher points out the ethical objections that the intensive tinkering with human genes will raise in the West formed by Christianity and humanism, the stunned face of the Chinese scientist mainly betrays incomprehension and surprise. Although ‘Genesis 2.0’ does not shy away from moral dilemmas and posits that life (and therefore the essence of being human) is in danger of being reduced more and more to bundles of big data, the documentary does not have a strongly alarmist tone. ‘Genesis 2.0’ mainly uses an inventorying approach. Our moral compass and the powerful political-business duality will ultimately determine how the blessings of synthetic biology for humanity and nature will turn out: source of well-being or just the next cash cow for the global multinational corporations guild?

‘Genesis 2.0’ is a sometimes somewhat slow-moving, but also intriguing documentary that presents the extinct mammoth as a driver and symbol of modern human ambitions and obsessions. The worlds of tradition and futuristic belief in progress are cleverly juxtaposed and juxtaposed in a film that asks a number of important questions about our shared future.