Spaceship Earth

8/31/2020

“Spaceship Earth” is a documentary that fails on the most basic level: it tells the story that nobody wants to hear. The film, blessed with the compelling story of the spectacular failure that was Arizona’s Biosphere 2 project, squanders its opportunity to show us what we really want to see. Instead, director Matt Wolf focuses on the 1960s counterculture that inspired the team of unappealing “Biospherians.” It’s a behind-the-scenes exploration, alright: the film just doesn’t open the door that you really want to look in. In 1991, eight hippie visionaries dedicated two years of their lives to live in quarantine inside a self-engineered replica of the Earth’s ecosystems in an attempt to chronicle their daily existence in the face of a life-threatening ecological disaster. The sprawling 3.