Reactionary, Robo-Sacer Dystopias: Cyborg Oppression and Right-Wing Biopolitics in Francisco Laresgoiti’s 2033

A paradigmatic scene in Francisco Laresgoiti's feature film 2033 (2009) occurs when the protagonist, Pablo (Claudio Lafarga) boards a helicopter with his friend, Milo (Luis Ernesto Franco), and a coworker to hunt. As Pablo and Milo take eyedrops laced with a new drug called Tecpanol, Laresgoiti crosscuts between the men on the helicopter and several large animals, including sheep and horses, which they pursue. When Milo aims at the horse and prepares to fire, Laresgoiti cuts back to the fleeing animal and reveals the game to actually be terrified human beings dressed in clothing that evokes the dress of the early twentieth-century Cristeros (Meyer 53). Though never directly explained, the drugs seem to have altered the men's perception in some way, causing them to see people of faith as animals meant for slaughter. Indeed, this near-future dystopia imagines a conflict based on the first Cristero War but set in the twenty-first-century (1926-1929)-1 Throughout the film, the military government uses different technologies to exploit its population and rid itself of religious people and customs. Nevertheless, an underground resistance challenges the dictatorship's legitimacy by using key technologies of domination in subversive ways that challenge antireligious and official narratives. In this way, the film represents a type of right-wing science-fiction dystopia that builds on the tropes of the genre to cast progressive and secularist ideals as threats to humanity.