Review: Ad Astra

Initially I was excited to see this, not sure why it got so little fanfare, and now I know. Critics were surprisingly positive. I notice that any time Brad Pitt is in something, they give the film as a whole an inflated grade, even if he turns in consistently good performances. I can see why critics get a warm glow from his projects - he's a good actor, he's good-looking, he's a nice guy and he takes his profession seriously. But that can't save everything, and a movie with him, Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones that isn't a home run strongly suggests there's a problem with the script.

And there is. This is a movie that can't make up its mind. Are we a near-future hopeful thriller, or a nostalgia film, or a dark reflection on the qualitative differences of the new frontier and whether humans are up to the challenge. (It is possible to be all three, but this film ended up with a few confused moments of each and executed on none of these themes.) Do we want to be a plot coupon-collecting adventure, or a psychological exploration? (It's hard to tell which was central in the writers' minds, and which was added to support the other, because both are so unsatisfying.) The reasons many scenes take place are thin and barely coherent.

Keep in mind SPOILER ALERT I only watched to the part where he contacts his father from Mars, and read about the rest of it online to avoid investing another hour of my life in it.

1. The most realistic portrayal of space travel in film? That's a serious assertion made by the creators of this? 73 days to Neptune and a week or so to Mars...come on. Very little in the way of considering automation. It seems like they took the aesthetic of the Apollo era and extended it to the late 21st century, except the rockets were magically faster.
   
   
2. Action sequences are overall, again, crow-barred in as well, to keep it interesting. The only one that seemed interesting was the fall from the exploding antenna at the beginning. Reminds you of the drop onto Vulcan in the first Star Trek reboot-meets-Baumgartner and Kittinger.
   
   
3. The journey across the Moon is where it really started to lose me. Why again do they not just land there initially, or failing that, at least take a rocket? Oh yeah, the Moon pirates. Surviving on the Moon takes a massive amount of infrastructure. So where are these Moon pirates hiding out that they're undetected, and how do their supplies get to them without detection? Within minutes of their appearance they're wiped out from over-the-horizon artillery, so it's hard to explain how a major operation like a Moon-base could get very far. Apparently it took a human seeing them to detect them (and not a satellite - ???) It's this and many other things that make the movie just seem like a cobbled-together set of action sequences with very little thought. We have almost zero background on the world situation at the time, which is made most obvious by these events (if the Moon is a war zone, who's at war? Over what?)
   
   
4. Why does a biomedical station have to be in interplanetary space between Earth and Mars? What do they get out there that they can't get in Earth orbit? This is where the movie more or less lost me.
   
   
5. Why again do they have to go to Mars to transmit to Neptune? And at closest, the one-way light speed communication time is four hours. Even if there is some hint I missed that in fact he's sitting there for hours, this is not conveyed well.
   
   
6. The "psychological" aspect to the movie - the father-son relationship, the protagonist's personality structure - is so trite and ham-fisted and again feels so crow-barred in that it's simultaneously irritating to have to sit through, and annoying at how ineffective it is. I thought the psych evals were going to be a clever plot twist and Pitt's character was fooling them.
   
   
7. Antimatter flares heading toward Earth and destroying all life? Even if this were the most realistic depiction of space travel, the liberties taken with other aspects of science dominate. It's a poor man's Interstellar, right down to its less effective attempts to carry on in the tradition of 2001.
   
   
8. The philosophical implications of being the only, or the first intelligence - unless there's something really subtle that the summaries missed, this movie really missed an exploration of a theme that's under-explored in science fiction in general and especially in movies.