Projected archive footage of green fields and roaming wildlife hints of a life long gone yet this footage ends with shots of natural disasters and even the H-bombs of mankind.

We cut to the year 2039 and a couple find a man in a coma – part of a possible human experiment and a flashback to a test subject succumbing to research gone wrong hints upon less than honourable scientific work.

The film flips between the couple trying to make sense of the how the body came to be and an organisation testing microchips on an endless parade of, perhaps less than willing, people.

Inserts of news stories harks to Hollywood disaster movies and a jazz trumpet score echoes the style of sleazy Blade Runner noir. And although its themes of apocalyptic pollution were no doubt conceived before our current covid crisis, the film has an eerie foreshadowing of a world in turmoil and global human suffering.

Some good use of imagery and filters from the director help convey the past in flashback and a variety of film styles help keep the visuals interesting and become part of the story-telling technique.

An area of improvement for me would include the long intro. There are at least two different title cards, further text on the credits, an image stating the year, archival voiceover explaining the world AND a further explanatory radio voice in the first 4 minutes. It’s a bit front-ended with backstory.

The film continues as it shows scientists in the past working on a patient called T-I-M-444 who we find is part of attempts to create donor organs. Then we again move forward in time to see the couple attempting to wake him by charging him up.

Back to the past and we get a fantastic spinning camera shot which follows TIM as he awakens and heads down a corridor to the great outside and here the two stories finally intertwine as it reveals the couple finding what they think is a disturbed man.

At the conclusion we get a coda about climate change but the film doesn’t quite connect its main narrative with the point it’s trying to make. A slightly haphazard tale of AI replacing life owing to human extinction, I found its metaphor a little scattershot and ultimately confusing. The film could benefit from a simpler message on just one of its many themes.

However, there’s more than enough big ideas to make this a satisfying watch. Yet perhaps an audience may need a second watch to make proper sense of it all. Yet the film certainly does bring you into its weird wonderful future world with solid visuals and a variety of influences. Part The Island, a slice of Phillip K Dick and a bit of the ecological sci-fi of Silent Running, its focus on life-threatening events is particular prescient today and Project 444 does so with an honourable message at its core.