Biosphere (2022) August 26th, 2023

In Biosphere, starring Mark Duplass as Billy and Sterling K. Brown as Ray, two childhood best friends struggle to survive the aftermath of an extinction-level event in a biodome. Billy is the last President of the United States who’s responsible for the destruction of life on Earth. Before he destroyed the world Billy tasked his best friend and deus ex genius Ray to build the protective Biosphere which would eventually become their salvation and the film’s sole location. This is all before the world ended and they started fucking each other.

Billy, like most Mark Duplass characters, is a slovenly idiot whose flippant attitude and tone-deaf banter deflate all the dramatic tension Sterling K. Brown works so hard to build. Billy’s childhood best friend/political advisor/science guru Ray is the perfect straight-man foil to Billy’s everyman idiocy. Ray is practical, scientific, and pulling all the weight in keeping the two of them alive in their artificial habitat while Billy waxes philosophical about the Super Mario Brothers.

Far from the lush habitat in the unavoidably comparable Biodome, the biosphere in Biosphere is more like a self-sustaining college dorm room. A kitchen, bathroom, bedroom with two twin beds and, a living room stocked with Super Nintendo, vinyl records, and plenty of movies. Two bathtubs serve as their garden and a fish tank stocked with three fish forming a small symbiotic system where the fish feed on algae in the tub and make nitrogen for the vegetables above for the humans to eat. The science in Biosphere isn’t quite as robust as that in a film like The Martian but this movie isn’t really about the science. Nevertheless, this very literal man vs. nature story really kicks off when the last female fish in their tank dies.

This causes an ecosystem crisis, without a breeding pair of fish to provide new sources of protein and sustenance Billy and Ray will run out of food and die. Billy doesn’t take the news of their impending death well and begins having stomach aches and bouts of moodyness while Ray puts his nose to the grindstone to science up a solution. In a twist openly stolen from Jurassic Park one of the two remaining fish in their tub spontaneously swaps sex. His gonads recede, his color changes, and eventually he and the other male in the tub breed making new little fish for Billy and Ray to eat. You do see where this is going right?

Billy’s penis has turned into a vagina. Yup. Suddenly Biosphere is no longer a predictable buddy comedy set in a biodome, it’s now a sci-fi rom-com about two childhood friends who breed for the sake of humanity. The script touches on a handful of social issues brought up by the sudden isolation-induced hermaphroditic transformation like homophobia, gender identity, and the responsibility of the last two men on earth to repopulate the species. Unfortunately, all of these issues feel like convenient soap boxes for the screenwriters to make points about modern sociopolitical issues while the believability of the story suffers.

For example, when Billy proposes breeding with Ray his stated and expressed motivations are purely scientific, mechanical, and sexless. Ray refuses and the two have a fight that ends in pushing and uncovering homophobia. The characters deal with these issues but I can’t help but feel like this interaction is rushed. We don’t see Billy go through a process in which his perspective on Ray shifts from best friend/coworker to sex partner. Instead, Ray changes his mind and eventually mitigates his reluctant acquiescence by straining through dumbbell curls as a way to bolster his fragile masculinity before buckling down and doing the deed. This is the best scene in Biosphere, but the payoff feels unearned.

I think the entire reason Biosphere exists is to justify filming a scene where two men fuck each other. I suspect everything from the setting to the character’s backgrounds were reverse engineered to justify this sequence. And that would be fine if the script earned it. Instead, the scriptwriters utilized the scenario to pontificate about accepting gender fluidity and letting go of learned homophobia at the expense of a believable scenario.

I’ll admit my unforgivingly strict sense of the suspension of disbelief adversely affects my ability to overlook when films bypass what I see as a natural or realistic course of action. I’m not as strict as to outright reject an absurd premise, but I can’t ignore when a movie like Biosphere focuses on two male friends struggling with how fucking one another would make them ‘gay’ instead of writing a script justifying the seemingly insurmountable challenge of tearing down decades of plutonic friendship and the emotional rewiring necessary before these two men get to the silly slapstick of male-on-male procreation. Instead, Biosphere insults humanity by suggesting all a man in a partnerless vacuum needs to complete sexual intercourse is a wet hole and tits. Pardon the vulgarity but that’s essentially how it’s worded in Biosphere, as if all men are Zeus willing to impregnate any random bull or swan or tree.

Once Billy and Ray breed they go through the rom-com motions of a manic pixie musical montage until outside forces damage the integrity of their habitat and push them to sacrifice their fish to protect their home. No, being more specific won’t make it more understandable. The film reaches its conclusion when Billy grows to appreciate Ray’s faith in magic by presumably conjuring a bowling ball out of thin air. No, being more specific won’t make it more reasonable as the film cuts to black as the sound of a bowling ball hitting the floor ends Biosphere.

I’m being rude, Biosphere obviously isn’t about depicting realistic science it’s about these two men’s emotional and ‘romantic’ journey. Much of that revolves around a contentious story about a magician who manifested a bowling ball at Ray’s 8th birthday party. Billy’s acceptance that the bowling ball was real signifies the completion of the character’s emotional arc. *Shrug* I guess you had to be there?

Duplass brothers’ scripts are easy to identify by their phony relaxed dialogue. Everyone in a Duplass script talks like a Kevin Smith character with less vulgarity and fewer pop culture references. There’s a faux everyman quality to their writing that feels like looking into the scripted version of the uncanny valley, it sounds like the way humans think humans speak but it’s just beyond the cusp of realism. It’s like if Aaron Sorkin wrote smut. This isn’t a taste issue by the way, I love both Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith but for some reason, the fabricated nature of the Duplass Brothers’ writing takes me out of their films.

The typical Duplass scripting, out-of-place college-humor, and unjustified character growth ultimately ruin Biosphere‘s promising premise and waste a generationally gifted actor’s phenomenal performance. Sterling K. Brown is Biosphere‘s saving grace. His performance is so enchanting that I would overlook every other subpar element just to see him perform again. It is a tragedy he didn’t have a more talented costar and a more mature script to sink his teeth into but don’t for a second imagine he didn’t feast on the scraps he was given.