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.

A truly missed opportunity, dealing with an interesting topic of a band of idealists, visionaries, hippies, in what is basically a cult-like setting, the show never develops into a coherent narrative that reveals much of interest. It kind of weaves, bends and meanders all over the place and, in the end, the viewer is left wondering about their individual motivation, why exactly they have failed, the dynamics of their relationships, the crux of the outcome or anything really besides the most superficial. A truly missed opportunity.

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.

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

A very cursive treatment of a bizarre and expensive project that fails to touch on any real explanation how a $200M investment achieved nothing.