The key to surviving the end of the world: get pregnant

Two guys are faced with an interesting dilemma after the apocalypse in the truly weird sci-fi buddy movie Biosphere.

Sterling K Brown and Mark Duplass in Biosphere

Biosphere (M)
In cinemas
★★½

We live in a frightening world of unpredictable climate change – fires, floods and destructive storms are occurring all over the world. No wonder, then, that more and more films deal with a dystopian future in which some ghastly event has destroyed most of life as we know it (in films of the 50s and 60s that disaster was usually a nuclear war).

The latest post-apocalyptic movie is Biosphere in which Mark Duplass and Sterling K. Brown play a couple of survivors of a never explained worldwide disaster who live together in a self-sustaining apartment safe from the lethal dangers of the outside world.

Billy (Duplass, who wrote the screenplay in collaboration with first-time director Mel Eslyn) is “a giant man-baby” according to his more serious mate, Ray (Brown), a scientist who designed and constructed the safe house in which the pair are living. In an early scene we see them exercising on what looks like a circular walkway derived from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) while they chatter interminably about popular culture (Super Mario Brothers being one topic). Outside their cocoon there’s nothing: just inky blackness, but these guys seem to have adjusted to a world with just themselves for company and they spend their time indulging in silly small talk and playing video games. Meanwhile they survive by eating fish they keep in a tank, though when the last female fish expires it looks as though their future food supply is going to be a problem. And it’s around about then that a strange green light appears in the sky.

This is the most curious combination of genres – part sci-fi, part buddy movie, part gender identity, part (though not much) comedy. The weirdness reaches a kind of apotheosis when Billy decides he wants to get pregnant.

The film is probing a number of contemporary hot topics – among them the fluidity of gender and the extremes of masculinity – but though it’s stuffed full of interesting ideas Biosphere doesn’t really come together in a satisfying way, despite the engaging lead performances.