In 1991, in the appropriately named Arizona city of Oracle, eight people thought they were stepping into a massive vivarium for a two-year, 24/7 science project. And they were. But they failed to realize what else they were stepping into: a shitstorm. Known as Biosphere 2, the “prefab paradise,” as dubbed by Diane Sawyer, soon became a magnet for controversy, including allegations of cults and charlatans.
And that’s only part of the story, decades in the making, told by documentarian Matt Wolf (Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project) in Spaceship Earth.
With $250 million backing and inspiration from the sci-fi oddity Silent Running, Biosphere 2 was the dream project of John P. Allen, a nomadic Oklahoma native who took a left-of-left turn after Harvard and assembled a countercultural theater troupe whose members then built themselves a self-sustaining ranch community, and after that, a seafaring research vessel, just because, hey, why not? Honestly, from there, an artificial ecological system doesn’t seem like a stretch.
Aided tremendously by copious home movies capturing seemingly every move of Allen and his crew, Wolf’s can-do New Age tale of wonder and might restores the credibility the brave and bold experiment initially had, until public curiosity beget a media circus, which in turn beget a controversy with no real stakes.
Whatever your stance, Biosphere 2 was a big deal when it opened — and then closed, hermetically speaking — but memories of it have fallen away. (And yet, the mindless comedy it inspired, the Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome — unacknowledged by the doc, for the record — is retroactively regarded as a “classic” by people who clearly saw it too young, before they developed taste.) The only thing more surprising than Spaceship Earth’s Rue McClanahan cameo is that of multishirted serpent Steve Bannon, but every good story needs a villain. —Rod Lott