June, July and August

The film was ... a bit of a disppointment. It started off with a MFA staff member in front talking about a different French film they had just added to the lineup that was actually worth seeing, which gave me a bad feeling. Unlike our prior foray into the world of French cinema, this movie was in English, but the cast spoke with such heavy accents it was impossible to make out most of the dialog, which turned out to be the only saving grace of the movie.

Here's my synopsis:

High life starts with Robert Pattinson (the star of the Twilight films) working on the outside of a spaceship while a baby screams at high enough volume that you immediately want to leave.
He drops his wrench, which falls, because there is no gravity in space.

Re-entering the spaceship, he takes off a glove, which floats weightless at the end of a string. The string used the entire special effects budget of the film, so in the next sequence he explains that the ship is under constant acceleration giving it artificial gravity.

This is all interspersed with close ups of Pattinson looking pensive and anguished, foreshadowing what eventually becomes clear, that this movie is the end of his career.

Through awkward and unnecessary flashbacks, we find out he's a convict that was forced with a number of other convicts to take a four year trip on a starship to scoop energy up from a black hole, lead by a woman doctor who so clearly has a screw loose that you can immediately understand why they put her in charge of a multi billion dollar starship, represented in the movie by a Nordstrom's shoe box.

The convicts are on the spaceship to do an important job, take the drugs the doctor hands out like candy. There are no guards, but fortunately the convicts are all reasonable, agreeable people until they start killing everyone, presumably because the doctor ran out of drugs and they have nothing better to do.

At some point, the doctor artificially impregnates one of the female convicts with Pattinson's sperm, hoping to produce a child that will scream loudly enough at the beginning of the film to drive the audience away, a gambit that fails.

As they reach the black hole, one of the convicts kills the highly trained pilot who is intended to fly a small ship made out of tin foil in order to skim energy off the black hole's event horizon. The convict, probably because they found a way to end their role in the movie, jumps into the scoop-ship, which fortunately has a big red Staples "Easy" button as it's only control, and takes off. She dies when she runs into a molecular cloud which is floating around outside the black hole because black holes have no gravitational pull, causing her to crash into the black hole and die by spaghettification (which is a real word, look it up).

Everyone else dies, generally violently, with the exception of one convict who has the unusual ability to bury themselves alive, which they do in the hydroponic garden.

Pattinson and his daughter are the only survivors, and Pattinson sadly ejects the dead bodies out the airlock after carefully dressing them in spacesuits to prevent them from suffocating in space.

Now we flash forward to where Pattinson's daughter is in her mid teens because the writers apparently forgot it was a four year mission. They happen to cross paths with another Nordstrom's shoe box... I mean spaceship.

Pattinson boards it and finds that is is crewed by feral dogs that are eating one another, except for one small, cute, lonely looking puppy that his daughter begs him to bring back to their ship. Clearly deciding that, if his career has gone down the tubes on this movie, no one is going to have a happy ending, Pattinson leaves the puppy behind to be eaten by the other dogs because it might be "contaminated," one would assume by association with the movie.

At the end of the movie, they find another black hole conveniently located next to earth, where they have a 2001 kind of ending, except instead of ten minutes of dazzling special effects, all they can afford is a yellow fluorescent light set against black construction paper. The End.

Bear was more subdued but seemed to enjoy the trip. Dobie was miffed that he was stuck in the cabin the entire time, but adjusted quickly enough.

The cabin was rustic and high tech at the same time, with networking gear and televisions and robots scattered around an otherwise cottagee kind of cottage. There were board games and sitting on the deck and boating around (with the pups and Jayjay).

There was one caterpillar that looked like it came from outer space.