Authoritarian efforts to suppress voices of resistance are as old as history itself. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars in the dystopian sci-fi Planet B, set in the year 2039 in France. The film shows us a future where Orwellian drones are hovering all around the city, and Big Brother is watching for sure. The failure of the Paris Agreement has created a world where climate change is not the headache of the authorities, and the people who care about it are forced to take radical measures to make a difference. So here we are discussing the film, which is a fever dream for people who love nature.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the movie?
An eco-terrorist organization called the R bombs several 6G towers and the warehouse of an influential corporation. The R demands that the authorities implement a complete moratorium on the usage of fossil fuels, but this world is hardly receptive to people trying to do good. A showdown between a few members of the R and the armed forces leads to Julia Bombath accidentally killing a soldier. Her young friend Eloi was already hurt, as his leg was mangled by a bomb, and Julia left him to die before getting arrested. Julia wakes up on an island, and a voice in her head informs her that she’s in a virtual prison called Planet B. The prison is situated on what looks like a perfect holiday island, but it’s not very pleasant for people who are nothing but NPCs (non-player characters) here. The authorities use certain kinds of VR sets that send their prisoners to this AR prison island. Every prisoner has their own room, and there’s a place called the dark room, where one can choose to give up the names of their associates, hoping for clemency. Now, this is a top-secret prison facility, and most likely illegal, and Julia and her activist friends are reported missing in official records and posters all over the city.
Who’s the surprise visitor in Prison B?
Out in the world, an Iraqi immigrant, Nour, is in trouble because the QR code on her lens, which serves as her visa in France, is about to expire. With mere two weeks left, she visits Hermes, a Black woman who sells forged lenses to immigrants. Hermes is unable to help Nour because the hacker who generates the fake codes is reported missing (one of the activists imprisoned in Planet B). Desperate for a way out of the country, Nour gets to know that it’d take a big amount of money for her to get to Canada. She works as a cleaner at a top government facility, where she’s thoroughly checked before entering. Life gives her a weird opportunity when she sees a few army people loading a shipment of high-tech equipment in the building. Nour steals one of the boxes and dumps it with the rest of the trash. She later sneaks into the recycling center and searches relentlessly to secure the box. The box contains the VR device the government is using to send people into the AR prison. When she’s unable to find a buyer for the device, she puts the device on, unaware of how it will change her whole life.
How do the authorities react to the intruder?
Unlike the prisoners, Nora can choose to leave Planet B when she takes the device off. When she first enters the island, she finds Julia, who thinks that she’s a fellow prisoner. But every prisoner there has a ‘B’ mark on their temple. When Julia finds no mark on Nour, she freaks out, thinking Nour is a government agent, and Nour takes her device off immediately. When the authorities notice this unusual event, they immediately track the device down to a chapel, which is across the street from Nour’s residence. She realizes that she can’t save herself this way, so she goes to Hermes for an encryption device that can hide her from the tracking devices. In Planet B, Julia is interrogated about the 7th person on the island, whom she pretends to not know anything about. Fearing this anonymous intruder, the authorities announce that whoever identifies this person will be immediately released as a reward.
How do Nour and Julia plan to expose the government?
Hermes arranges a secure bunker for Nour, and she goes back to Planet B to communicate with Julia once again. The first time she visited, Julia asked her if anybody was looking for them, but of course, Nour didn’t know them or the context. Upon returning, she researches Julia and her friends and finds that they’ve been reported missing, along with a video where Julia’s law-abiding father is begging for the whereabouts of his daughter. Nour tells Julia about her desperate circumstances, but Julia thinks it’s a ploy of the government. When she makes a point to Julia about how the media is reporting that the people of R are on the run from the police, Julia starts to believe her. It’s all a big cover-up, and the authorities are torturing the activists using their guilt and trauma in the form of nightmares. The torture gets so bad that we see a woman named Victoire tying herself to a pillar to not hurt herself when the nightmares start. Eloi sees a mutilated leg and all sorts of disturbing visions, and for Julia, it’s the soldier she accidentally killed who haunts her every night. The people are losing their sanity on Planet B. Some stand with eyes stuck on the blistering sun, while others dig feverishly at the ground, trying to escape the virtual hellhole dressed up as a chic airbnb.
Nour gets to know that the facility she works in has a restricted area called the Blue Zone, and she senses that Julia and the others might be kept there. At this point, we get to know that Nour was an independent journalist in Baghdad 10 years ago, and she wrote for an underground news website that was technically illegal, but they delivered the truth without bias or censorship. Nour had to escape the country, and she assumed the identity of a woman who died trying to cross a gigantic wall in the Mediterranean built to stop African immigrants coming to Europe. Even though she is running out of time herself, Nour starts caring for Julia and the horrible condition she was in, and that drives her to work hard to set her free. Julia gives Nour the contact of a guy who possesses a set of lenses marked with QR codes and urges her to reach Canada to deliver the story to a media contact. However, Nour had other plans in her mind.
Does Nour manage to extract Julia?
Desperate for both her own survival and to save Julia, Nour first visits Julia’s contact to get her lens changed. She has written a story about the prison and its prisoners, and she trusts this guy with it to make sure people get to know about it. In Planet B, their nightmares get worse, and the constant whispers try to manipulate the prisoners into giving up more names. When one of the activists sees Nour sneakily meeting Julia and then vanishing, they tie Julia up and torture her for betraying them and robbing them of their chance at a free life. The relentless torture has turned all of them into lifeless cadavers. Nour practices real hard to sneak a matchstick into the building, and she successfully does so. Knowing that the story is out there, Nour sets a fire in the control room of the facility and gets arrested. She ends up in Planet B, this time with a mark. Julia thought she’d leave for Canada, but Nour reassures her that she had no life to start afresh, and our lead characters have fallen for each other. Soon the people of R surround the building, assuming they got to know the truth. They take the security of the building down and rescue the “missing” activists and Nour just in time.
Planet B ends with a news debate discussing if digital prisons are cruel or the new solution to overpopulation in physical prisons, but I think we all know the answer to that one. The movie succeeds in maintaining a theme that revolves around survival, totalitarianism, and the indomitable human spirit fighting for good.
