One of the key points of “Spaceship Earth” is that the valuable lessons that emerged from that study - the breakthroughs and the setbacks alike - were drowned out by a media blitzkrieg eager to brand the mission an unambiguous failure. You may have read about Biosphere 2 in the news years ago, or perhaps you saw it parodied in the Razzie-winning 1996 Pauly Shore comedy “Bio-Dome.” Chances are you haven’t heard much about it since. But the film - which is being shown at drive-in theaters, in pop-up cityscape projections and on multiple streaming platforms - would make for fascinating viewing under any circumstances. One way to approach “Spaceship Earth,” Matt Wolf’s layered, absorbing and sympathetic new documentary, is as a madly in- ventive primer on responsible dystopian-hermetic living. The challenge of living in self-imposed isolation with limited resources is, of course, an especially relatable subject at the moment for reasons the filmmakers could hardly have anticipated. It was a scientific experiment and a domestic one, a test of how humankind might endure in a self-enclosed environment on this planet or the next. For two years, from 1991 to 1993, eight men and women sealed themselves inside this eight-story, three-acre terrarium and made it their research laboratory and their home.

Jutting out of the hot, dry ground of the Sonoran Desert, it was designed as a microcosm of the entire planet and thus contains its own worlds in miniature: an ocean, a savanna, a rain forest.

The mighty steel-and-glass compound known as Biosphere 2 is a sight that never loses its beauty, its absurdity or its wonder.

Neon microcosm