Bluespace

If there's a deeper point to the documentary Bluespace, it seems to be lost in the film's bizarre pairing of theories about terraforming Mars with an oddly dispassionate critique of our relationship with water right here on Earth. Not just any water: the documentary specifically focuses on the waterways, wetlands, harbors, and coastline surrounding New York. On one hand, viewers hear from a scientist and various visionaries about how to turn Mars's desolate surface into a hotbed of water and vegetation by pumping the atmosphere with greenhouse gases—creating a new home for humanity once we're through wrecking our own planet. But the many water-related problems facing New York—some precipitated as far back as the city's founding, while others are much more recent, including rising seas, the destruction of all-important marshes, and disgusting levels of sewage and other pollution—certainly suggest that we have no business tinkering with other worlds. Ultimately, Bluespace struggles to draw any conclusions, inundating viewers instead with hundreds of images of land and water, many of them just “alien”-enough looking that one never knows if the camera is on the third or fourth planet from the Sun. And there's an element of self-congratulation to director Ian Cheney's approach—given the lack of an actual point-of-view or unifying thesis—that is frankly annoying. An optional purchase, at best. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)