Hot Docs 2025: Shifting Baselines
It’s rare that a documentary showcases truly astounding cinematography, but as Shifting Baselines is so fixated on the transcendent power of space travel, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Julien Élie’s documentary traces the changes in the small coastal village of Boca Chica, Texas, where Elon Musk’s SpaceX houses its “Starbase” and builds rockets for the eventual colonization of Mars. It’s a gulf backwater transformed into a Mecca for space obsessives and Musk acolytes who head on pilgrimage to witness the glimmering rockets towering over the marshy landscape.
The film takes its title from the process of degradation of a natural environment and the lowering baseline of what is considered healthy—drinking water quality in Flint, Michigan comes to mind. Thus, Shifting Baselines charts the dystopian degradation of this small town sacrificed on the altar of Musk’s Martian ambitions. As someone fascinated by space travel and intrigued by SpaceX (despite my Musk reservations), the film’s focus has obvious interest for me. But I wasn’t prepared for its invigorating visual approach.
Shot in black and white in the Academy ratio, Shifting Baselines depicts the town and base and their surrounding environment as something from another world. Early shots show the glittering chrome rockets draped in fog; they’re reminiscent of 1950s science fiction films where other planets are often foggy in order to disguise the studio backlots. Élie’s camera fixates on the rockets, the eerie glow of the Starbase signage, and the industrial activity that reminds us of Blade Runner, among other industrial visions of the future. But it’s not solely interested in rockets and SpaceX.
It’s also fascinated by the natural environment and the people in the base’s orbit. We learn that the construction of Starbase and the frequent test launches of rockets have severely impacted the environment of Boca Chica. The lagoons have dried up, distressing ornithologists who study the vast numbers of birds who live in the waters, including herons and plovers. The fiery crashes of failed launches have vaporized the surrounding shrubland. Élie’s camera observes biologists finding abandoned nests and flocks of herons landing on the misty waters. It’s hypnotic. It’s also illuminating.
Not that the entirety of Shifting Baselines is about Musk skeptics and biologists. It also follows admirers, including a former NASA scientist who now lives outdoors under the stars and camps out on the beach not too far from the launch site. His ingenuity is on full display as he powers up a computer monitor via battery cables and a satellite link in order to watch the SpaceX announcements via livestream. Later, he basks in the glory of the promise of Mars and talks excitedly with a local resident about what he believes the future holds. We also watch a few SpaceX launches themselves, sitting with the Texans and space enthusiasts who pull into Boca Chica to watch the launches from the roofs of their camper vans. These sequences recall similar scenes around the Apollo program of the 1960s and how people would flock to Cape Canaveral to watch the launches. While the 1960s Space Race might have been more mainstream than current SpaceX missions, it’s clear that we’re still a culture compelled by space travel.
Of course, as an astronomer in Saskatchewan tells us—whose job is compromised by the increase in satellites and space junk created by Starlink, another Musk venture—our fixation on Mars can come at the expense of the planet we currently inhabit. No matter how much Earth degrades, it’s still more habitable than Mars. Thus, our efforts could perhaps be balanced by exploring beyond the Earth while maintaining our terrestrial home, instead of simply accepting the shifting baselines here in favour of going elsewhere.
Shifting Baselines never becomes a didactic message movie about environmental degradation and the folly of Musk. In fact, it’s fairly disinterested in Musk as an individual, which is to the film’s credit. Rather, it’s a hauntingly beautiful portrait of change, in a tiny Texan town, in a gulf wetland environment, in an age when our species is caught between the inadvertent terraforming of Earth and the intended terraforming of Mars.
8 out of 10
Shifting Baselines (2025, Canada)
Directed by Julien Élie.
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