Review of Wonderful Days (2003)
Following a near-apocalypse of war and pollution, some people begin to “convert pollution into energy”, enabling a high-tech society for about a tenth of humankind. However, the pollution is now being depleted, and the question is raised whether the higher caste should create more of it in order to maintain supremacy over the far greater population living in filth, who are ready to riot.
Primarily visual SF action adventure. Visually quite stunning, mixing live action, traditional cel animation and CGI, much of it top notch for the time. The story suffers from a severe lack of creativity and some grossly unrealistic elements, such as the trajectory of a certain truck, and the utopian ending.
The basic premise is memorable and not entirely foolish. For instance it would be possible to reduce atmospheric CO2 by growing cadmium-doped photosynthetic bacteria with acetic acid as a commercially useful byproduct, creating an economy with some inertia against renewable energy. However, converting pollution in general “into energy” lacks the necessary specificity for verisimilitude, and that is probably intentional.