According to Charles Darwin and every credible evolutionary scientist since, individuals do not mutate, species do. But it suits the makers of Biosphere to imagine that that’s how evolution works – the survival of the fittest obviously being the fittest individual. Let’s just say it again – it does not work that way.
OK, so, parking that objection and instead accepting “individual mutation” as a metaphor being used to challenge the “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” crowd, let’s dive into this strange two-hander set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone apart from two men are dead.
Billy and Ray. Two dudes. Bro’s. We meet them jogging around the biosphere discussing the Super Mario brothers, as they obviously do every day. From the slightly weary look on their faces, the inconsequentiality of their chat, the brittly bright banter, they have been here a long time.
It turns out that Ray (Sterling K Brown) built this life-saving biosphere – full of plants and fish and air scrubbers and all the tech. It also turns out, in a funny joke I won’t ruin, that Billy (Mark Duplass) used to be someone very important, and it was he who ordered the building of the biosphere. He did not take much interest in the building of it, it becomes clear, which is why the books available in this sealed survival dome are Ray’s choice, literature classics in hardback, not Billy’s – he’s more the beach read type.
Then one day something happens. Diane dies. She was the last female in a tank of fish named after the characters in Cheers. Ray and Billy are now also going to die because fish were their source of protein and without a female there will soon be no more fish. But providence, or nature, or random screenwriting nonsense, steps in and, some days down the line, Woody, one of the surviving male fish, starts to undergo “sequential hermaphroditism”, something this species does not do. Woody is turning from a male fish, which shoots sperm, to a female fish, which lays eggs. Fishkind might be saved after all.
What if the same thing were to happen to one of the two humans in this dome? Would humankind also be saved? Equipped with the ability to reproduce, would it be able to accompany fish into the sunlit uplands of the future?
That’s what Biosphere is about – sexual fluidity, gender fluidity, the whole trans/gender/identity enchillada served up as a comedy asking questions about the extent to which personality and identity are determined by physical attributes, and wondering whether, beyond all that, men protect and women nurture, regardless of where they started out on the XX/XY axis.
Fans of Mark Duplass’s work will recognise Humpday at the back of this debut film by director Mel Eslyn, which she co-wrote with Duplass. That was the one about straight dudes doing it for a bet. It was funnier than this is, and a touch less laboured.
And by laboured I refer you to the “bowling ball” which exists as a story within the story, a metaphor within the gigantic metaphor of the film. Ray relates how, at a party when he was a kid, he was completely bamboozled by a magic trick a children’s entertainer played. The adult literally made an eight-pound bowling ball materialise out of nowhere. See. Even the solid is not solid. Even men are sometimes not men.
There are standout moments – as the unlucky (discuss) man gradually loses his male genitalia and starts to develop a vagina, the guys have a goodbye party for his penis. His farewell speech starts with the words: “From the moment I knew you, I loved you…”
Generally, it’s more gently amusing and good-natured than snortworthy, a high-concept sci-fi with an unusual plot and two actors who work together well, especially as the plot takes Ray and Billy right out of their comfort zones. And I mean right out of their comfort zones. Towards the end there’s also a bit of jeopardy, when external forces intervene. It’s a small lightbulb moment – wouldn’t it be good if there’d been a bit more of that?
In Super Mario Bros., Mario is Mario and Luigi is Luigi, his brother. They had roles assigned by the programmer. Is that how the world really works? Biosphere doesn’t answer that question but it does ask us to remain open to all possibilities. That is, after all, what sci-fi does.
Biosphere – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
