BEFORE: I had a thought that I might change the plan and watch "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" next, because that would complete a trilogy of films set in the Australian desert, right? And it would work, with David Field carrying over from "The Rover". It's a little odd, don't you think, that the SAME day I put "Furiosa" on my list and check the cast, there's an actor who was in the movie I just watched? Normally I might take that as a sign, and quickly abandon the path I was on in favor of the new one. BUT, I feel like I just made this chain, and it's going to take me to "Napoleon" and the new "Mission: Impossible" film and then the "Divergent" movies, and I've psyched myself up for that.
Also, I really need to clear THREE Robert Pattinson movies off the DVR, and "The Rover" was just the first of them. If I watched "Furiosa" next, there's no guarantee I could get back to "High Life" before the year's end, and I need some space to work with on that drive. Sure, if I padded the chain now and found a way to move "Divergent" closer to the end of September instead of the beginning, I think I could get from there to the start of the horror chain in about two steps. So why don't I just do that? Well, I haven't got the time right now to rework the chain also I don't know if I can get to the "Divergent" films iif I go through the new "Mad Max" film. Look, I'm sticking with the plan, I feel confident that I can build a September chain that starts with "Divergent" and ends somewhere I can work with, something that will lead into my 16 ot 17 October horror movies.
So, as planned, Robert Pattinson carries over from "The Rover".
THE PLOT: A father and his daughter struggle to survive in deep space where they live in isolation.
AFTER: Well, I guess it's too late to rethink this. This is a sci-fi film but it's really a bummer of a movie also - in flashbacks we see most of the crew of this spaceship either get sick, get killed or commit suicide. Plus most of the story is told in flashbacks, at the start there's just one astronaut and his daughter, but eventually we learn what happened to the rest of the crew, and, well, it's not pretty. So yeah, great, a bummer of a film with non-linear editing and a very ambiguous ending, I tend to hate all of those things.
The idea that some space agency supposedly had was to put a bunch of convicts with death sentences on a spacecraft and send that into space, aimed at a black hole, umm, just to see what would happen to them, essentially they're test subjects. What could possibly go wrong? Sure, they're out of prison, but they don't get to enjoy it, instead they travel through the radiation found in deep space, which eventually will kill all of them if they don't kill each other first. Also, they're traveling near the speed of light, so after just a few months they leave the solar system and then communication with Earth is essentially cut off, because their messages take so long to go back home, and then a response from mission control would take even longer to reach them.
Great, so, umm, any good news?
Well, there's a female doctor who's experimenting on them, to see what it would take for people to have a baby in space, if that's even possible. The prisoners don't get to have sex, no, they're using artificial insemination so they've taken most of the fun out of that process. So the men are all sperm donors and the women are all fertilized, against their will except that none of them have any free will. Look, space travel is probably stressful enough without also being experimented on, and knowing that this ride is going to end in a few years when they reach the black hole, yet they HAVE to keep filing updates with Earth, though they have no idea if their reports are even being received. Then there's the normal close quarters of space travel, the isolation, the terrible food, and on top of all that, they've really just traded one prison for another, since they can't leave the ship or go anywhere, and the only other people they have to talk to are other prisoners. Hey, it's kind of a little like how Australia was started in the first place, as a giant penal colony.
It turns out that at some point, we stopped sending our best into space, and instead we started sending rapists and murderers? Does this make any sense? Though I guess the intent was to find out what happens to people in deep space so we can properly protect the "good" people when it's their time to go. Umm, sure, OK, but really, who signed off on this? There are plenty of other things here that don't make sense, like when they get to the black hole, the best test pilot among them is supposed to fly a shuttle near the edge of the black hole to see what would happen to her. But another spaceship passenger knocks her out and takes her place, and so she instead learns what happens when all those cosmic forces and pressures basically turn her body into a stretched-out mass of spaghetti-like strands. And wait, she WANTED this to happen? That's insane, but that's where we find ourselves. Maybe she wanted to be famous for being the first person to die in a black hole, only that's not a thing and also, nobody back on Earth is ever going to know it was her.
Other crew members commit suicide or let themselves out of airlocks, because their situations are so hopeless, I guess, or maybe it's the radiation causing them to not think straight. But honestly if I found myself in this movie, I'd probably kill myself to get out of it, too. Eventually there's just one prison-naut left, Monte, as we saw at the beginning, and he's taking care of a baby, which is probably his, only we're not really sure, because it's complicated. Monte spends the last year or two (?) of the mission trying to repair the ship, sending his daily reports back to Earth (he HAS to, or the ship won't function, I think), but hey, there was probably enough terrible food for 9 passengers and now it's just him and the baby, so at least they won't starve.
Eventually the baby becomes a teenager, and one day they encounter another ship from Earth, only the less said about that, probably the better. Then something happens and the movie ends, but I'll be damned if I can understand what it was. What a bummer and what a waste of my time this was.
Also starring Juliette Binoche (last seen in "Wuthering Heights"), André Benjamin (last seen in "White Noise"), Lars Eidinger (ditto), Mia Goth (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Agata Buzek, Claire Tran (last seen in 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Ewan Mitchell (last seen in "Saltburn"), Gloria Obianyo (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), Jessie Ross, Victor Banerjee (last seen in "A Passage to India"), Juliette Picollot, Mikolaj Gruss, Weronika Wachowska.
RATING: 3 out of 10 rubber gloves
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