“A haunting and visually striking meditation on the cost of progress.”

Julien Elie’s Shifting Baselines tells the story of several irreversible changes to the natural landscape of Boca Chica, Texas. Surrounded by the Brownsville Ship Channel to the north, the Rio Grande and Mexico to the south, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east, Boca Chica has, perhaps inevitably, become a key site for the American space program, both public (NASA) and private. So, in the name of space exploration public beaches have been closed, swamps drained, and the local fauna and flora irrevocably altered. By contrasting the technological ambition of looking beyond our planet with the environmental degradation left behind, Elie highlights a stark irony: neither the people interviewed in Shifting Baselines, nor we as viewers, are the ones who will be leaving Earth – but we are already the ones paying the price. 

To achieve this, the director divides the film’s interviews into two groups that, initially presented as distinct segments, gradually become more and more interdependent. The first features space enthusiasts, or people who travel south through America to witness rocket launches in person. The second focuses on locals whose lives have been directly impacted by the transformations required to build a functional spaceport. Thus, some of the film’s most compelling moments come when the connections between these two groups become clear: a shared concern about the stories we tell ourselves about the future. For Shifting Baselines is, after all, a film as much about storytelling as it is about launching rockets. 

This becomes especially clear when a fisherman shares his concern about the dwindling fish population, and how only the smallest ones remain, barely worth eating or trading. But more than that, he worries that children growing up in the region, and eventually their children, will believe it was always this way; that the sea never teemed with life, or that the fish were always so small. Meanwhile, in a different place, a man speaks about how he spends his free time learning about rockets and space programs. He’s mocked for it, but he insists on continuing, not for himself, but for those who will one day write history. Everything must be documented, he says. 

In their own ways, both perspectives – though worlds apart – share a deep understanding: that things change, and the way we talk about those changes shapes both our future and our memory of the past. This idea is beautifully conveyed through Glauco Bermudez and François Messier-Rheault’s black-and-white cinematography, which gives Shifting Baselines a futuristic tone that amplifies the characters’ anxieties and obsessions about what’s yet to come. At the same time, by rendering the desert landscape and launch-site pollution in stark monochrome, they manage to apocalyptically frame an Earth that is already beginning to resemble Mars. 

All in all, Julien Elie’s Shifting Baselines understands the power of the stories we tell ourselves, not just about the past, but about the future. And in doing so it never shies away from, for example, calling out Elon Musk’s Starlink project and its disastrous launches and its role in contributing to space pollution, a commendable quality of the film. In other words, Shifting Baselines suggests that the push to colonize Mars is, above all, a program to colonize our minds, to make it seem acceptable for governments to ignore the environmental catastrophes happening here and now. Because supposedly there’s a backup plan, a fresh start waiting elsewhere. Perhaps, unfortunately, this is also the film’s major flaw: each of its narrative threads could easily support an entire film on its own. So by the time the credits roll, some parts may feel underdeveloped or insufficiently explored, while others, like the stories of those who travel to watch the launches, linger a bit too long. Still, what remains is a haunting and visually striking meditation on the cost of progress, and the narratives we cling to in order to justify it.