Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I have wildly mixed feelings about Biosphere, which I really wanted to like. I also went into it quite eager to find out what this movie about two men stuck for years, with only each other, in a sealed biosphere after a global catastrophe, would have to say about sex, and attraction, and what having no other option does to people. We’ve all heard the stories about prison, right? Presumably this would be a similar scenario, just minus the criminal aspect.

What I did not expect was for it to tackle sexuality within minutes, and head on, and then effectively make it part of the entire premise. It just didn’t do it in anywhere near the way I thought it might, or even that I particularly wanted it to. I won’t spoil the turns the story takes, but I will say it felt a little bit like a copout, and like a movie that thinks it’s progressive is actually being a little regressive.

Beyond that, the premise has vast potential for deeply nuanced discussion of sexuality and gender roles, of which director Mel Eslyn, co-writing with Mark Duplass who also co-stars, barely scratches the surface. Instead we are presented with a pair of childhood friends who are now dealing with the fallout—quite literally, it would seem—of the most recent U.S. President’s deeply bad decisions, in the face of the advice of a best-friend advisor (from the opposing political party, no less).

The fact that these characters are middle-aged men who were recently the President and his advisor turns out to be utterly pointless. Very few truly political ideas get explored, and this backstory seems to exist only as a handy backstory and nothing more. I’d have found Biosphere much more successful were it about two best friends who happened to build a safe haven in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that was not of their own making. That way the story could focus on their relationship as friends and regular people, Americans sure, but the idea of their political leadership (or lack thereof) feels very awkwardly shoehorned in.

It also has nothing to do with the supposed “evolutionary jump” that occurs to the fish in their tiny pond, as well as to Billy and Ray themselves. And here we come to my biggest hangup about Biosphere, the same issue I had with last year’s Crimes of the Future: the preposterousness of a so-called leap in evolution that does not, could not, and will not ever happen. The fact that they even directly reference the “Life finds a way” quote from Jurassic Park is meant as amusing but just underscores how derivative this truly hair brained idea is. This could have been so much more incisive a story had Eslyn and Duplass merely stuck with an exploration of what forced, extended isolation with just one other person does to people in ways that are actually plausible.

To be fair, that is not especially the Duplass brand. Mark Duplass plays Billy, the former president; Sterling K. Brown plays Ray, the guy who was really pulling the strings—this being one of the sources of resentment between them, which could just as easily have been done without making them titans of politics now rendered restless man-children.

What eventually happens to them borders on otherworldly. A bonkers as the plot becomes, they are fun to watch together, and the one real compliment I will give to the writing is the fact that this is a two-hander in the truest sense of the phrase—we see no other actors onscreen, ever, except these two—and the film still manages to hold the viewer’s attention. Duplass and Brown feel like childhood friends.

But, the more Biosphere went on, the more embarrassed I became by it, as it couches itself in what it wants us to take on faith are extrapolations of real-world scientific ideas. Except that fish are not amphibians and humans are not fish, and Biosphere is finding ways to conflate them all in ways it hopes we won’t notice.

I might be willing to forgive a lot if, for instance, the fantastical things that occur were a springboard or nuanced examinations of human relationships. I think Biosphere is crafted to make us think that is indeed what it’s doing, except that every idea it examines, it does little more than regard as a slight amusement. This is a movie deeply confused about what it wants to be, which is a disservice to any of the legitimate ideas it touches on.

*The laws of nature get thrown right out the biosphere window.*

Overall: C+