A mini-planet with mini-planet problems
Unrated. Stream on Hulu, or rent on Amazon, iTunes and other platforms and pay TV operators. 103 minutes.
You don’t need to dig deep to find stories of what went wrong at Biosphere 2, the artificial environment in Oracle, Ariz., where, from 1991 to 1993, eight people sealed themselves off from the world in an effort to live selfsufficiently on a microcosm of the planet. (Biosphere 1 is Earth.) That moonshot didn’t exactly hit its mark, but the appeal of “Spaceship Earth,” a new documentary from Matt Wolf with bountiful and often beautiful footage of the ordeal, is in getting the story from inside — that is, from the people who lived inside this titanic terrarium.
“Spaceship Earth” devotes its first half-hour or so to setting the scene. Biosphere 2, devised by a utopian-minded collective that came out of San Francisco, was hardly that group’s first boondoggle. It had previously run a sustainable ranch in New Mexico and mounted avant-garde theater productions. The collective’s charismatic leader, John Allen, had a taste for moving from one faintly arbitrary challenge to the next.
Wolf doesn’t do much to demystify Allen, whom critics perhaps unfairly likened to a cult leader. The other interviewees largely speak of him with affection, and the movie mostly buys into their assessment of him as an oddball visionary who approached projects with a theater man’s show-must-goon determination. Discussing auditions for Biosphere 2 candidates, the genial and softspoken Allen says he looked for freethinkers, automatically eliminating people who followed others. That sounds great — but doesn’t it violate the principle of random selection? And wouldn’t he look for a particular cross-section of scientists, anyway?
Indeed, whether the live-in qualified as good science was always a sticking point for critics. It started with too many variables, and its integrity fell apart. Jane Poynter, a “Biospherian” (the term given to participants), briefly left the site for medical care and carried things in when she returned. The Biosphere had a carbon dioxide scrubber, a device capable of removing excess amounts of the gas, even though Biosphere 2 was supposed to run off natural processes.
Biospherian Mark Nelson dismisses that lapse, saying that the scrubber was “inconsequential” and could take out only a “limited amount” of carbon dioxide. When, earlier, another participant, Linda Leigh, calls what was going on in the Biosphere “more of a different way of doing science” that is not hypothesis-driven, it sounds like what she is describing is — well, not science.
The movie barely pushes back on such excuses, treating the endeavor with the same swoony reverence as Owen Pallett’s overused score. But if “Spaceship Earth” isn’t taken as a fullthroated endorsement of the research, it is enjoyable (and maybe even a tad insufficient) as a human interest story. The marooned eccentrics included a physician, Roy Walford, whom we’re told believed that he could live to 120 and that a low-calorie diet was the secret to longevity. (Food shortages in the Biosphere offered a test case.) Anyone intrigued by the prospect of romance under the dome will come away disappointed: A passing mention of couples is as steamy as this greenhouse gets.
Like the project itself, “Spaceship Earth” winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.