{"id":10595,"date":"2018-10-03T18:28:36","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T22:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10595"},"modified":"2019-09-16T11:31:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T15:31:59","slug":"high-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10595","title":{"rendered":"High Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent yesterday night at the New York Film Festival, watching Claire Denis’s new film High Life<\/a>. For a detailed and accurate review of the film, see the one at Variety<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This film is about a voyage to a black hole, in some sense an anti-Interstellar<\/em><\/a>. Where the scientific plot of Interstellar<\/em> was inspirational and made no sense at all, in High Life <\/em>you get a plot that is all too plausible, and completely depressing. There’s a spaceship headed on a mission to a black hole, but this one doesn’t have brilliant scientists, traveling in a clean and shiny environment, and out to save the world. Instead, the crew is a bunch of ex-Death Row inmates, stuck on a dead-end trip in a filthy spacecraft swarming with recycled excrement, being subjected to grotesque sexual experiments, with periodic violent assaults, murders, and screaming babies to liven things up. <\/p>\n

The supposed mission of the spacecraft is to travel to a nearby black hole and test whether energy can be extracted by the Penrose process<\/a>. Because of all the murdering and such, that doesn’t work out too well. The ending involves another trip into a black hole, with discussion of whether they’re going to hit a “firewall”. One character thinks not, but that sure looks like one to me at the end. Theorist Aurélien Barrau is listed as “Cosmic Companion” or some such, and must have been responsible for providing the higher level of scientific verisimilitude than that of Interstellar<\/em> (one of the images of a black hole does look like the famous one Kip Thorne provided for the earlier film).<\/p>\n

I can’t really recommend this film to the average viewer seeking enlightenment or entertainment. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something unrelievedly grim, grotesque and disturbing, and really like black holes, maybe you should check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent yesterday night at the New York Film Festival, watching Claire Denis’s new film High Life. For a detailed and accurate review of the film, see the one at Variety. This film is about a voyage to a black … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10595"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10598,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10595\/revisions\/10598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}