Mark Reviews Movies: SPACESHIP EARTH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 7, 2020

Most people probably haven't thought of Biosphere 2 in about 27 years, if they thought or knew about it at all. It mostly exists as a disregarded joke at this point, although Spaceship Earth tries to put the experiment into a more positive context. The movie still has a few chuckles at the project along the way, because they're unavoidable.

That inconsistency of tone and purpose is certainly one of the main issues with director Matt Wolf's documentary, which tells the story of the once controversial, then infamous, and now forgotten research facility in the Arizona desert. For those who have forgotten about it or never knew of its existence, Biosphere 2 was a three-acre structure, designed to replicate the various ecosystems of Earth. It was meant to be enclosed and self-sustaining, meaning that the environment outside the facility would have no impact on the environment within it.

Could people live in there for a number of years with only the air, food, water, and other resources generated and maintained within the facility? If they could, it might be a step forward to colonizing worlds beyond our planet.

The goal of the project, we learn, was admirable—even rather ingenious. Goals, though, don't mean much, if the people who come up with them don't have plan for making them work in tangible, practical ways. We also learn that lack of a real plan was the single error of the Biosphere 2 project. Therefore, it was too big not to fail.

The story basically comes down to a case study of a group of people's ambition far outreaching their ability to accomplish something worthwhile. We get that impression almost immediately in the movie, as the so-called "biospherians"—a group of eight people who would live inside the Biosphere 2 for two years—prepare to enter the facility. It's supposed to be an exciting moment for science and discovery, but the researchers look lost.

The image, captured by curious news media from around the world, doesn't exude much confidence. If this is such a tremendous event of such historical import, why does everyone about to go inside the facility look as if they drew the short straw?

The answer, as we learn after a lot of back story, is that they mostly had no idea what they were supposed to inside Biosphere 2. Obviously, they were to maintain the environment, tending to the plants and animals inside, and to keep track of data points, such as carbon dioxide and oxygen levels. Otherwise, they were there to do whatever, just to prove that it could be done.

We laugh at the follies—how the hatch refuses to close after the biospherians enter the giant terrarium, how an injured researcher returns from an unexpected visit to the hospital with two bags filled with supplies, how all of the technological secrets of the facility eventually came to light and showed it to be an impressive sham. Wolf wants us to laugh, but he also wants us to see the project as a worthwhile one. It very well might have been, especially under better supervision, but the filmmaker's focus on the oddities of, the personalities behind, and the mistakes of the project never gives us a reason to think of Biosphere 2 as anything more than expensive, disorganized, and dead-end lark.

Wolf begins with an overabundance of exposition, explaining how the people involved in the Biosphere 2 project came from a background in a San Francisco commune, which became a vagabond theater troupe and group of enterprising tinkerers. Their leader was John Allen, a charismatic dreamer in the 1960s who would later be accused of overseeing a cult. Such is the way of things.

We see them performing, building a seaworthy ship, traveling the globe, starting international business ventures (an outlier, for sure), and diving deeper into the worldviews of thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome design would become an inspiration for the Biosphere 2. Archival footage, filmed by members of Allen's group, is intercut with interviews of its participants in the present day, now older and clearly happy to tell a story that has been ignored for decades.

They were—and, as much as they can after everything that happened and has occurred in the world, remain—dreamers. For all of the great ambition and to-the-stars ideas that the project failed to live up to, Wolf seems to be counting on the group's sense of personal fulfillment as the main takeaway for this tale.

After the lengthy buildup to the experiment, the movie finally gets into the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day operation, the constant setbacks, the shady behind-the-scenes shenanigans, and the ultimate failure of Biosphere 2. This section of the movie is both amusing and startling as an autopsy of how much could go wrong and why it did. Wolf attempts to put the idealism behind the idea and the reality of the execution on equal footing, but the end result is a sense of dissonance. The intentions, as pure and optimistic and forward-thinking as they might have been, simply don't come close to matching how badly the project mucked up the goal.

Spaceship Earth wants us to have a sense of regret about what could have been with Biosphere 2. We do—mostly because nobody seemed to know what they were supposed to do.

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