Spaceship Earth | Little White Lies

Space­ship Earth

07 May 2020 / Released: 08 May 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

Directed by Matt Wolf

Starring Jane Goodall, John Allen, and Tony Burgess

A group of people in red uniforms standing in a large indoor space with a glass roof and lush greenery.
A group of people in red uniforms standing in a large indoor space with a glass roof and lush greenery.
3

Anticipation.

The red jumpsuit promo image evokes the most outré corners of sci-fi.

4

Enjoyment.

Entertaining and edifying in equal measure.

5

In Retrospect.

The central metaphor gets richer the longer you think about it.

The true sto­ry of a group of peo­ple who spent two years quar­an­tined in a giant repli­ca of Earth’s ecosystem.

Just out­side of Tuc­son, Ari­zona, in 1991, eight sci­en­tists vol­un­teered to seal them­selves in a self-con­tained, self-sus­tain­ing geo­des­ic dome called the Bios­phere 2 for two years. It would be one of the bold­er exper­i­ments of its era, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly paving the way for the cul­ti­va­tion of new worlds; in prac­tice, a thick­et of sna­fus (oxy­gen fil­tra­tion prob­lems, caloric defi­cien­cies, a media cir­cus intent on inval­i­dat­ing the project) con­signed it to the foot­notes of 20th cen­tu­ry research.

If Matt Wolf’s new film sole­ly chron­i­cled the goings on in and around the Bios­phere 2, he’d have a crack­ing work of retroac­tive reportage on his hands. But as he sees it, that’s only half the sto­ry – his archive dig­ging takes us all the way back to the 1960s, and to the unlike­ly ori­gins of the Bios­phere mis­sion in an eco­log­i­cal-mind­ed avant-garde the­atre troupe.

On this grander can­vas, Wolf has assem­bled a the­sis about how ide­al­ism can be dashed by real­i­ty, some­times nec­es­sar­i­ly and some­times not. He zeroes in on the utopi­an odd­balls as a micro­cosm for the entire envi­ron­men­tal­ist movement’s seedlings, their ambi­tions too pure to sur­vive in a com­pro­mised world. We get to watch the peo­ple of plan­et Earth blow it right before our very eyes.

In the heady days sur­round­ing the Sum­mer of Love, a group of free thinkers known as the Syn­er­gists set up shop on a ranch in Ari­zona. Their goal? A tru­ly clean and bal­anced life, in which they could pro­vide for them­selves eth­i­cal­ly and respon­si­bly. They were more prag­mat­ic than the hip­pies, not unwill­ing to engage with cap­i­tal­ism in the out­side world, and yet no more than they had to. They achieved some great things, most notable among them the con­struc­tion of the Her­a­cli­tus, a gigan­tic and ful­ly func­tion­al sea­far­ing ves­sel that freed them from the bound­aries of society.

The log­i­cal exten­sion of that impulse to live out­side of the norm birthed Bios­phere 2, the per­fect fusion of their con­ser­va­tion efforts and spir­it of sci­en­tif­ic inquiry. As Wolf digs into the minu­ti­ae of their quixot­ic tri­al in long-term iso­la­tion, his ample expe­ri­ence in record-trawl­ing yield­ing the sal­vage of some tru­ly incred­i­ble footage, he frames up Bios­phere as a sym­bol of human aspir­ing. The par­tic­i­pants brought a fan­ci­ful con­cept down to Earth with a com­bi­na­tion of imag­i­na­tion and sober know-how, which makes the impend­ing mishaps all the more tragi­com­i­cal­ly potent.

Start­ing with the grand lock-in blown by a latch ill-fit­ted to its door, the Bios­phere scenes play at times like dead­pan slap­stick. Wolf coax­es laughs through edits, cut­ting from mod­ern day talk­ing head ses­sions with the for­mer Bios­phe­ri­ans to their foibles at the time. He nev­er makes pie-in-the-sky space cadets out of his sub­jects, how­ev­er, even if they may dress the part with their snazzy apple-red ensem­bles. Wolf con­veys a tac­it skep­ti­cism, per­haps well-found­ed con­sid­er­ing the project’s short­com­ings, to go with his admi­ra­tion for their dar­ing and moti­va­tion to do mean­ing­ful good.

Wolf draws vivid cin­e­ma from a gold­mine Wikipedia arti­cle, real­is­ing its full enter­tain­ment val­ue while arrang­ing the facts at hand to trace the gap between what’s phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble and what’s insti­tu­tion­al­ly per­mit­ted. Wolf artic­u­lates a com­pli­cat­ed state­ment and makes it go down like a sci­ence-fic­tion-inflect­ed adven­ture – he even has a humdinger of a twist up his sleeve, plac­ing this near­ly three-decade-old sto­ry in a vital cur­rent con­text. He gives the bad word of edu­tain­ment a good name.

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