Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth (2020) is Matt Wolf's documentary, and you can watch online on iFILM. It follows an audacious experiment: eight people sealed themselves for two years inside a vast glass-and-steel structure that packed a rainforest, an ocean, a desert and a working farm under one roof. Outside lay the planet; inside, a hand-built replica of it.

Wolf assembles the film almost entirely from the crew's own home footage, so it watches less like a tidy history lesson and more like a dispatch from inside the capsule. Where did these dreamers come from? How did a 1970s theater commune morph into a team of "astronauts" under glass, what went wrong with the oxygen and the harvests, and why did the public start crying cult? Wolf lays it out without passing sentence, leaving you to decide whether this was folly or an idea that arrived too early. At heart it's about a small band of stubborn people trying to reinvent the world. Stream Spaceship Earth (2020) online on iFILM.