🚀 DAVID BOWIE

The resilience of the American space program is best embodied by the astronaut movie that tanks every year. And they just keep coming. Why, Lord, why? Let’s try to solve this riddle by running the gauntlet of the latest batch of terrible astronaut movies. High Life! 

This might have been the best, (meaning worst) of the bunch. The plot seems to be some bullshit about a bunch of death row inmates flying to a black hole and to do fertility experiments? Then slowly killing each other off? And there was a fuck room. Why this wasn’t called Fuck Room is its own riddle. A riddle wrapped in an enigma straddled in a fuck room. And when the inmates aren’t taking turns in the fuck room, they’re Pondering Life, trudging around the most low-tech depiction of a “spaceship” outside of a student film. Seriously, it makes Dark Star look like the Death Star. I’m 100% convinced this was filmed at Initech. But sometimes the low-rent effects pay off. Something about an office building as a spaceship works for me. But when bodies are dropped out the front door onto the sidewalk, er, I mean out the airlock and into unforgiving and awe-inspiring void of space… it was pretty fucking funny. But I did enjoy their depiction of what happens to a body in a black hole. Spagettification! I am glad High Life acknowledged that these celestial toilets go squeeeeeeeeeeeesh rather than magically morph into an Interstellar bookcase made of love. But yeah, High Life is one of those skeevy movies you always assume is headed for incest even though no one is related. Just a feeling. And beside some striking imagery right out of Visitor Q (when that one astronaut is lactating milk and just sitting there furious because she realized someone impregnated then plucked a baby out of her), mostly you’ll be wondering why the cockpit is the rec room at Dunder Mifflin. 

Speaking of toilets! Then we got, what, Lucy in the Sky, about some astronaut who shit her pants in her car instead of in outer space? Shit your pants in the rocket, lady, that’s what it’s made for! Don’t get your shits on Route 66. Talk about burying the lede. In her pants. She’s floating in a most peculiar way… NEXT.

So nobody saw those two movies except me, then the same nobodies lined up for this Ad Astra therapy session. Has there been a worse title? More like Bad Astra am I right! More like Dad Astra. Sad Bastra(d)? Lots of dad shit is my point. And underpopulated! Like every movie these days. It had all this TALK of world building, but they never showed this world built. So it gave the whole movie the foundation of a hazy, no-stakes dream sequence. And, of course, it rips off Apocalypse Now, 2001, but not in any interesting ways. Cool moon chase though! It’s like a car chase, but very quiet! In space no one can hear you go zoom. But the stink of dad shit lingers on this thing like Aqua Velva, something about Brad Pitt looking for his dad at the ass end of space. The Ass End of Space here is played by stone-faced veteran Tommy Lee Jones, who continues to work “not wanting to act” into character motivation. Spinning straw into lead! And there was some dad shit in High Life too. So maybe that’s the Rosetta Stone here. Sad Dads. I’m guessing there’s probably plenty of dad shit in First Man but I had to skip that one. Wake me up when it’s The Last Man (in Space)  because nobody gives a fuuuuuuuuuuck. Seriously, it tanked too. They all tank! More tanks than Tiananmen Square up in this bitch. More like AstroNOTS am I right? But why does this keep happening?

My new theory is that people just don't give a shit about space right now, if they ever did, because their concern is with the human condition and general state of terribleness on terra firma. And when Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing we can do, heading for social oblivion seems more urgent than quantum oblivion. So fuck astronauts, and fuck all those little brats who wanted to be one when they grew up. They already cracked that code at birth when they shit their pants and everybody clapped.