When you’re doing something that no one has ever done before, you learn by doing
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...
#23 : Spaceship Earth
An eye-opening eco-documentary about the Biosphere 2 experiment in the 1990s, in which a commune of like-minded people built a closed ecosystem in Arizona to try to improve humans’ relationship with the natural world.
Never heard of this one - I was expecting either a dull but worthy piece of hippy nonsense or an amusing tale of disastrous hippy nonsense. And well, it kinda falls somewhere in between, but I'm not entirely sure how much I'll be able to tell you about it.
The story starts in San Francisco in the late 60s, so it won't surprise you in the slightest to hear that there's planty of hippy nonsense involved with the main protagonists establishing an experimental theatre group (but didn't everyone back then?), which involves exactly the amount of nonsense that you'd expect. However, it soon becomes clear that there's slightly more spine to this outfit than you might expect with them first building a ranch (which they had no prior knowledge of), then building a ship (ditto), then sailing it around the world to get involved in various other very interesting projects. And then they decide to build a biosphere - which they pretty much just do.
And so, for the first hour, there are a lot of interesting tales but absolutely no tension at all - if they don't know how to do something, they just work out how to do it and then go and do it. And who wants to watch that?!? Funnily enough, once the volunteers enter the biosphere for 2 YEARS, some tension does arrive - and even better, it doesn't come from the direction that you're expecting it to. However, I'd be lying if i said it was the longest lasting tension I've ever seen in a documentary and things get resolved without anyone breaking too much sweat and the project runs to a reasonably successful completion.
And then, with 20 minutes of the film to go, when we're settling in to hear some pleasant reminiscing about the project and some information on "what happened next", it pulls the rug in a most unexpected fashion - but has absolutely no time left to explain or investigate the consequences of said rug-pull. So we're left with some brief "this is what they're doing now" and a considerable feeling of "what? you didn't think that needed some more investigation/explanation?!?". And if there's one feeling you don't want a documentary to leave you with, then I'd suggest that's probably it.
Given it's a documentary, there's not really anything to comment on acting, light or sound - it's all archive footage or talking head interview shots which are done well, but surely they're not the hardest things to do? So, it's an interesting story that I wasn't aware of - I suspect I must have heard something of it back in the 80s when it was all going down but, even if I had, there was a lot of enjoyable nostalgia (particularly the hairstyles), characters and back story here that I enjoyed. But there's a lot of questions not only unanswered, but not even asked, which is extremely disappointing - overall, I'd say it's a very worthy subject for a film which is unfortunately not given the best (or most complete) treatment.
At the time of writing, the film is available to rent on most of the usual channels - but I can't say it's an overwhelming recommendation for me.
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