Biosphere
Mark Duplass has written and starred in plenty of low-budget mumblecore projects (like "Safety Not Guaranteed", "Creep", and "Jeff, Who Lives At Home" to name a few), and "Biosphere" is much in the same vein as his other works, where loosely improvised and naturalistic dialogue is more of a focus than plot. In this case, Duplass plays Billy, the last president of the United States, who lives in a dome with his former adviser and brilliant scientist Ray (Sterling K. Brown). It's revealed that they are likely the only survivors of some kind of apocalypse that Billy had a direct hand in causing. We watch Billy and Ray go through their daily routine, which includes a morning jog, playing video games, and maintaining a fishpond that is crucial to their continued survival. The duo has been friends since childhood and seem to be in good spirits despite their circumstances, sharing friendly banter as they go about their daily tasks.
In what is surely some super thinly-veiled commentary, Billy, the former president, is very much an overgrown teenager who just is not very bright. He is almost completely reliant on the intelligence and know-how of Ray, who is painfully aware of this fact. Duplass plays Billy as generally affable in a goofy stoner kind of way, but his constant inane chatter and frat boy behavior is almost instantly grating, making it seem beyond plausible that he would ever be friends with the intellectually curious Ray, much less ever be able to run for office (although I guess recent political results would say otherwise). In a movie that tries to dig into the inner psyche of both men, it might've been better served to make the characters seem more like real people.
Instead, we are treated to the pair airing out their numerous insecurities, which usually results in a fight that is cleanly resolved by the next day when one character cutely apologizes by loudly giving a heartfelt monologue to the fish. It doesn't ever feel like these arguments are anything more than bullet points in a script that we have to get through in order to move on to the next thing. And there are lots of things, from body image to sexual identity to the two-party political system to being raised with homophobic tendencies, just to name a few.
After 45 minutes or so, the movie veers wildly thanks to a pretty large twist, so SPOILERS ahead in this paragraph. Soon after the only female fish dies, Ray discovers that one of the remaining two males is incredibly undergoing sequential hermaphroditism in order to be able to continue the species. Almost immediately afterwards, Billy also suddenly starts to undergo a spontaneous sex change, which the two speculate is nature's way of allowing the species to survive. The next half an hour feels a lot like a bunch of male filmmakers speculating on what they think it means to be a woman, often painfully so. We can tell Billy is changing into a woman because the movie seems to think being a woman means actually having feelings. He also gets his period ("it feels liberating!") and develops an intense desire to have children, two things that may be relevant to the plot point of post-apocalyptic survival, sure, but also feels bit like the filmmakers had a white board with the word "WOMEN" on it with a few things that they know women do underneath. There are potentially some interesting things to say using this kind of set-up but the filmmakers aren't interested or aren't capable of doing it, even if they seem to have the best of intentions.
Ultimately the characters serve as symbols for ideas, but the ideas aren't fleshed out in a way that comes anywhere close to saying something true or even interesting about the complexity of real people. If this is meant to be an examination of the patriarchy (as Duplass has referred to the movie's protagonists in the press) coming to terms with the changing modern world, then we still have a hell of a long way to go.
