Documentary Releases: Spaceship Earth (2020) - Reviewed

Courtesy of NEON

Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running predicted it.  Jason Bloom’s Bio-Dome made fun of it.  But nothing can prepare you for the real thing as chronicled in Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, the true story of the controversial 1991 Biosphere 2 experiment where eight people were hermetically sealed inside a manmade ecosystem for two years as part of a multimillion-dollar project years in the making.  What was meant to provide research into possible interplanetary colonization without harming the Earth’s own atmosphere in the process quickly devolved into disorder akin to the Stanford prison experiment with cult-like tendencies and a penchant for theatrics over science.  Damaged goods for years, Spaceship Earth seeks to set the record straight while also highlighting the things that helped Biosphere 2 come to be as well as the contributing factors to its ending. 

 
NEON’s pickup and release of the Sundance Film Festival documentary Spaceship Earth came at a curious time which saw all of humanity worldwide quarantined due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  Released in May 2020 on streaming platforms, the film makes a good companion piece to Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public which likewise painted a picture of the cult-like behaviors emerging from an ambitious and expensive sociological experiment put into practice.  The story of Biosphere 2, while well intentioned on paper, soon saw the eight ‘biospherians’ breaking their own rules and the project’s validity was also called into question.  Is it a scientific study or was it a charade and construct not unlike King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein Castle, opulent in scale but ultimately a creation of indulgence? 
 
Comprised of never-before seen as well as previously telecast footage of the construction of Biosphere 2, the formulation of the research team and archival as well as newly recorded interviews with the surviving members, the impression one gets is that we’re among a group of pseudoscientific eccentric college students who partied a lot and came up with a vision.  As they transitioned into adulthood, that collegiate mentality seemed to carry over which made them the perfect candidates to both begin the project as well as bring about its tarnished reputation.  Whatever the case, the story is both critical of and sympathetic to their cause as the plot later thickens with wealthy investors trying to grab the project out from under them. 

 
All in all Spaceship Earth like We Live in Public presents a wealthy entrepreneur somehow financing a sociological experiment that saw the future while also plainly unraveling the psyches of the participants and chief creators.  In other words, what was meant to foresee pioneering innovation in both cases wound up being uncanny insights into the peculiar if not dysfunctional minds driving both endeavors ahead.  That said the film doesn’t mock the subjects as it highlights their flaws and mistakes made.  Biosphere 2 and the biospherians living in it for two years might be a joke to most people but as you’ll see in Spaceship Earth, real or not they took their efforts seriously.  That in and of itself is hard not to rally behind.

--Andrew Kotwicki