Out on the prow of the Titanic, she thought. It’d be just like this – bad lighting, too much blue light to sleep – all the comforts of home.
High Life (2018) is a puzzling bit of incoherent dark science fiction which raises more puzzled eyebrows than it does questions.
An unnamed spaceship is on its way to visit a black hole for research purposes. The problem? There’s no real researchers on board; instead, everyone’s a criminal, and not the nice kind, either. At the head of the pack is the ship’s doctor, who has atrocities of her own on her mind even as she tries to use the ship’s crew to breed children in the high radiation environment of outer space. It’s not clear why she’s trying to do this, other than maybe the technical challenge of it all, but she’s hardly a Mr. Spock sort, so that doesn’t really fly.
All of which raises the question of Why spend the resources involved in building a ship with a propulsion system capable of reaching 99.9% the speed of light when you’re sending a crew who could easily remain on Earth, housed in a prison? After all, none of them have superpowers or have committed particularly horrific crimes. They could stay on Earth. What a waste!
And it’s not as if I like to have every single question wrapped up by the end of a movie, but I do like to have a few credible possibilities for those unanswered questions. There seems to be no such supposition here.
In any case, the one celibate crew member ends up fathering a daughter as they approach the black hole, while the rest of the crew find various ways to end their lives, which means only Dad and the daughter are around when they find …
… a sister ship full of dead and dying dogs is also approaching the black hole.
I’ll bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?
Neither did I.
It’s all kinda too bad, because these are actors committed to their art, along with the film crew, but the story is just too full of holes to really find believable credible. There’s little to learn here, and if there are allegories, they’ve escaped from the aquarium, and generally this is just a big bummer of a film without the morality tales that come with good film noir.
Yes, I did finish watching this, but I’m not sure I should have.
