Spaceship Earth

Take a group of people, friends, a bit of imagination and an open mind, a desire to make a difference and a vision for our future - take another group of people interested in money, greed, power - and...

A fascinating documentary that shows what a small group of well intentioned pioneers can achieve in the cause of humanity and ecology, with passion and belief, with teamwork and adventure - it's well worth a visit to Biosphere 2, if for no other reason than that.

Welcome to the fantastic future of 1991 as the human petri dish project BIOSPHERE 2 is underway! What looks like a kooky SciFi piece of last century fiction, turns out to be a bizarre true life experiment, sequestering idealistic science nerds in their self-sustaining eco bubble.

Rife with cult overtones and extraordinary characters, "Spaceship Earth" documents a group of giddy dreamers as they pave the way for future planet colonizations by creating their own pressure cooker mini earth. What could go wrong?

Well, much does indeed go wrong, but unfortunately, nothing of the sensational variety. There is no physical rebellion. There are no monsters spawned. There are no lives lost. Yet it is damn fascinating: the spectre of a tight army of red uniformed humans scurrying about their self made ant hill aquarium, whilst the world literally looked on.

There is a "Truman Show" aspect at play here, as organizer, impresario, Grand Poobah and owner of a wacky combover, John P. Allen (aka Johnny Dolphin) dictates the inner proceedings from an outside control room. That is, until there is a power struggle featuring, wait for it, Steve Bannon. Yep, you can't make this stuff up.

Strangely the BIOSPHERE 2 phenomena, which at the time was a world wide sensation that predicted genius nutbars like Elon Musk, is relatively forgotten.

That mistake has now been remedied. Enjoy.

• hipCRANK

This was nothing but another hippie commune that failed.

It was exposed back then as being a bogus scam, that they weren't sealed off from the world, at all!

Water and air were piped in regularly, and they had a huge food stockpile inside that they depleted.

I watched ~twenty minutes, then gave it up as just another eco extremist propaganda film.

I knew very little about this story going into the movie and so I enjoyed all the background it presented. What makes this film work so well is the mass amount of archival footage it has. It has great characters and well shot interviews with a good message.

The first 30 minutes was a little slow and I wanted to get into the main story sooner is my only negative.

Tucson, Arizona is my hometown and in all honesty, I have seen Biosphere 2 only once. It is a magnificent structure that makes you wonder what compelled eight people to try and make a life in this small and enclosed space. While there are plenty of controversies about the legitimacy of the project and the band of individuals who constructed this experiment, it's pretty clear that a great many people (especially those on this review page) have very little idea about the idea of allegory.

I'll start with the structure of the documentary, which for all intents and purposes is fine. They probably could have trimmed off 15-20 minutes of the buildup to the Biosphere 2 but it was fascinating to see the mindset of the people that conceived this idea. While the defamatory buzz word of "cult" is always tossed around, usually critics are forgetting that a cult's main job is to take money from its participants and grow. Hmmm.... I wonder what religious organizations do that? Try all of them.

Anyway, my only gripe is they didn't focus enough on the inner turmoil of the crew once it starting hitting the fan. While this would have added a bit more doom and gloom to the film, I think a less rose colored lens would have helped. It's clear they didn't have enough scientific help on the project, and it was also clear they were not transparent about the countermeasures in place with the back-up systems. But I also think people jumped on the negative too quickly. This was an experiment that was the first of its kind, and one has to understand that not everything is going to go perfectly. News media, especially the local Tucson news which had a rather conservative bent at the time, were all too willing to mock the idea of "hippies" with the capital to make this happen.

Ultimately, one of the former crew members summed it up perfectly. Capitalism has monetized any potential science associated to the project, and it remains a strange tourist destination in a dusty small town. It's the monument of steel and glass in an area that is largely old houses and mobile homes. It was a shock to see perpetual liar and scum bag Steve Brannon in this mess, clearly illustrating that his terrible talking points and smug superiority was not a recent development.

This story does illustrate one thing that I wish people would take more seriously. Each person does have an affect on our own biosphere. Whether we think we are insignificant or not, we cannot buy into the capitalist doublespeak that business and "Wall Street" minds can solve the ills of society and our planet. They have no long term goals, no personal responsibility to other human beings and no soul. Go ahead and give me a down vote for that if you like...you know it is true.

There was a great scene at the end of the movie Silent Running that illustrated the conundrum of our current humanity. The space ship was being called back and the corporatists that destroyed the planet felt the right thing to do was simply continue destroying, even if it was the last piece of beauty left from our great planet. We need to continue to maintain our planet, for we are not going to some other planet any time soon. And frankly, blowing up the ship is not a viable option.