Musk’s Martian ambitions under scrutiny in Elie film

My conversation with French-Canadian documentary filmmaker Julien Elie ended on a grim note.

“Everyone knows that we are facing the end of something,” he observed bleakly, “but collectively we don’t change anything. It’s frightening. Global warming, attacks on human rights — I’m completely pessimistic about the world we live in.”

Nevertheless, I found interviewing Elie an invigorating experience. Perhaps it was simply the pleasure of talking to a passionate, meticulous artist who is dedicated to his craft. We spoke over the phone a few days before he travelled to SA for the screening of his latest film, Shifting Baselines, at the Encounters SA International Documentary Festival.

Elie’s documentary takes a sceptical look at Elon Musk’s Martian ambitions. More specifically, it explores Starbase, the SpaceX construction and testing site located in Boca Chica, Texas, where the Rio Grande (marking the border between the US and Mexico) meets the Atlantic Ocean.

In May, Starbase was granted city status, and it now has its own mayor — a SpaceX executive — with schools and housing to accommodate a growing population of employees and hangers-on. 

When Elie began making the film a few years ago, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Starbase was in an earlier stage of development as a company town.

The rockets and launch towers looming over an otherwise empty skyline drew a motley crowd of observers to the precinct and its perimeter. Tour groups, opportunists, free spirits, stragglers, vagabonds. Environmentalists. Protesters. People who have drunk the Mars Kool-Aid.

There are no titles or voice-overs identifying the people we meet in Shifting Baselines, but we soon learn about their competing interests.

After a failed launch, eco-activists assessing damage to the wetlands surrounding Starbase are subjected to drone surveillance.

SpaceX hobbyists, picking through the rubble for souvenirs, wax lyrical about the “pretty cool robot dogs” that will soon be able to assess the levels of post-launch danger.

Voices from across a spectrum of beliefs and opinions are treated respectfully, without commentary or judgment by Elie as silent listener.

We are presented with a series of scenes, tableaux and dialogues rather than a preachy narrative. Referring to the Starbase pilgrims he encountered, Elie affirms that “it would be too easy to laugh at them”.

First, “the political context is very different now to what it was then” — that is, before Musk joined Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

Elie is confident that many of the starry-eyed “dreamers” and SpaceX fans he interviewed did not vote Republican in the 2024 election. Second, he understands why they may be worried about the future of life on Earth and why the idea of escaping to another planet would appeal.

“Of course,” Elie adds, “I don’t agree with that solution. I think the Mars project is foolish and a waste of money.” But he didn’t want to make the film about “good people” and “bad people”. Rather, his view as documentarian emerges as the contradictions in the SpaceX project become self-evident. One interviewee bemoans the damage humans have done to the earth and looks forward to an alternative future for the species in space: “Hopefully we’ll be smarter next time and not destroy everything as we go.” 

Yet “destroying everything as we go” is exactly what is happening in Boca Chica. Each launch brings sound and atmospheric pollution, layers of dust, shock waves and debris raining from the sky — some of it landing hundreds of miles away. Bird life in and around the nearby lagoon, which is supposed to be a natural “refuge area”, has obviously been devastated.

This environmental degradation is evocatively conveyed through the film’s monochrome footage. Elie has shot previous films exclusively in black and white — “They are the two basic colours in photography, so it just makes sense to me,” he explains — but doing so in Shifting Baselines is especially apt.

At times, the mise-en-scène portrays Starbase and surrounds as a stark wasteland, an industrial Mordor. At other times, the black-and-white aesthetic harks back to early Cold War film, TV and government propaganda (from both sides) that depicted the space race in relentlessly optimistic terms.

Residential developments appear to imitate 1950s suburbia. Some of the SpaceX disciples imagine themselves at Cape Canaveral in the 1960s: “This is our Apollo programme,” declares one.

When Elie first visited this “crazy place”, it seemed like the set of an old science fiction movie. “The rockets looked fake. You wondered if they could even fly — and as it turns out,” he adds, alluding to the litany of subsequent SpaceX explosions, “they don’t really fly very well, you know?”

Elie notes that keeping the film in black and white also creates “a feeling of distance, as if someone from outer space were attempting reportage on human beings. It’s not us, but it is completely us. In colour, it wouldn’t have that impact.”

Above all, however, Elie admits: “I just love composing a frame in black and white.” His eye delights in chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and shade, and viewers admiring the cinematography of Shifting Baselines will marvel at how Elie and his team “paint with light”.

This links to another key conflict within the film: differing responses to the bright specks of stars and satellites against the dark canvas of the sky. SpaceX acolytes, looking up at night, may be thrilled by the frequency of satellites crossing their field of vision. But is this a cause for wonder — or should we be alarmed by the accumulation of clutter orbiting the earth?

Elie visits astronomers in Massachusetts and Saskatchewan to learn about the horrifying scale of the problem of space junk. There are currently 7,500 Starlink satellites in orbit; 60,000 more are expected before attempts at interplanetary travel begin in earnest.

Scientists who have simulated a scenario of 65,000 satellites warn that this volume of traffic will result in exponentially increasing collisions — an unstoppable cascade of space pollution known as the Kessler Effect.

In addition, as satellites have a limited lifespan, more than 20 a day will get partially burnt up in Earth’s upper atmosphere, with a significant volume of SpaceX debris making landfall.

The shared night sky, one expert observes, is now different from what it has been for all of human history. Radiation aside, this raises a philosophical paradox; our ancient connection with the sky, which led over millennia to space travel, is now being severed by the gratification of that yearning.

This severing is part of a wider “intergenerational amnesia”, which is where the film gets its title.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a concept developed by marine biologist Daniel Pauly to describe how we mistakenly measure change (for example, decreasing fish population size or other markers of ecological damage) using points of reference that have themselves changed from what they used to be.

In other words, we don’t see the full extent of how bad things have become over time.

The inevitable long-term outcome? Widespread ecosystem collapse and species extinction. Elie tells me that the comfort he takes in natural beauty — which is evident in the film’s lovingly rendered visuals and soundscapes of watery environments, birdlife and vast open plains — also drives him to “film all this as if it was the last time we were able to do it”.

Shifting Baselines is a timely documentary in many senses. I ask Elie about the film’s relationship to the ebbs and flows of American politics, given the risk that its reception may be skewed by the faltering Musk-Trump bromance.

“What we’re talking about in the film is much bigger than those individuals,” he replies. “For me it was important not to focus on Musk. He, and even his company, might be gone soon; but there will be others doing something similar. It’s the same story of colonialism and imperialism that’s been going on since... well, forever!” 

One excited interviewee in the film claims unironically that seeing the rockets being constructed at Starbase is like watching the building of “the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria” — which, as every American schoolkid learns, were the names of the ships Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. 

Before we decide to populate other worlds, we might reflect more critically on the human appetite for land grabs. Another voice in Shifting Baselines points out that the colonial history of Boca Chica and the surrounding area has been both ignored and repeated by SpaceX. 

SA audiences, particularly attuned to this strand in Shifting Baselines, are likely to find that Elie’s film dampens their enthusiasm for making the country dependent on Starlink.