Ad Astra (2019)
September 22, 2019 7:05 AM - Subscribe

An astronaut travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. He uncovers secrets which challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos.
posted by octothorpe (48 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Okay so what got shot in the Neptune craft that killed them all instantly?

And can duct tape really seal in baboon-eaten-freshness to the extent the guy would at least survive a space walk?
posted by angrycat at 12:09 PM on September 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


That's a hot mess of a movie. It's beautiful to look at. Space technology is shown in a no frills, ultra-realistic way. Many sequences are great when considered invidually - Roy's fall, the moon pirates, the space monkeys, the crass commercialization of space. There are some shades of Solaris, 2001 and Apocalypse Now. But the plot doesn't make any sense and is 90% handwavium, which is something I usually forgive for tentpoles or low budget stuff like Iron Sky, but this is supposed to be more than just entertainment. In the end it's all about Sad Brad trying to figure out his daddy issues IN SPAAACE, with some positive message about life tacked on the end. Liv Tyler is mostly blurry, Natasha Lyonne shows up for 5 s as her Russian Doll character, and the great Ruth Negga is underused (and there's no closure for her character). That's too bad because there's a really great "thinking sci-fi movie" lurking below.
posted by elgilito at 12:19 PM on September 22, 2019 [13 favorites]


having Natasha Lyonne croak out "Welcome, earthlings" was a pretty weird moment
posted by angrycat at 12:38 PM on September 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


I went into this really excited and just felt that drain out of me for the entire first act. As each stupid plot point got introduced, I kept trying to rationalize that the filmmakers had explanations that made sense. First it was the "space surge" that they blamed on "anti-matter"?!? Then the whole bit about having to travel to Mars to record a voice mail as if they couldn't just relay an encrypted message to the antenna on Mars? I was starting to lose it when we got to Moon Pirates but when they somehow pulled the space-brake and stopped their spaceship on a dime halfway to Mars and got attacked by space apes, I just lost it.

Were those studio mandates? "Great script, Jim, but could you punch up the action a little? Add some moon pirates and space apes, that'll get the kids in the seats".
posted by octothorpe at 1:11 PM on September 22, 2019 [14 favorites]


Thank you, I was worried I saw a different movie from all of the reviewers I've read. Hot mess is right. I get it, take Heart of Darkness and throw in some "daddy didn't love me" and spaceships. They just moved from one location to the next, no real reason why, introducing and dropping characters left and right, even having the protagonist kill the entire crew "accidentally".

I had to keep from laughing out loud when he jumped from the rotating antenna, through the rings of Neptune and landed on his ship, then used the nuclear blast to boost him home. I almost choked.

I could have handled the bad science, that's just the way of most movies, but this was boring. I didn't care about anybody or what happened. And I like a wide variety of movies, it has to be pretty bad for me to dislike it so much, not since Prometheus have I felt this way.

The ships were pretty good, the space suits were really well done. And I ate a nice Mediterranean chicken bowl while watching it. So I had that going for me.
posted by beowulf573 at 2:41 PM on September 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


I had fun watching this! I thought it was going to be two hours of moon battles but turns out it was an over the top metaphor about some kind of middle age crisis.

I found it great that he gets called into this secret meeting to be told that his father, who has been gone for 20 years, is threatening to destroy the whole universe from his retirement home in Neptune. The "phone home" sequence was also great: Brad Pitt has to go to Mars, the last secure location in the solar system, to read exactly a preapproved message to his father, watched over by an assortment of authority figures.

My crazy theory is that the ending was initially set on Saturn, not Neptune and that the studio spiffed up the movie with recognizable brands and action sequences to remove as much weirdness as possible.

I think Brad Pitt's character gets off too easy overall. I theorize that the original story goes like this: father kills all his "Neptunian" crew, the angry monkey kills all the Norwegian scientists, and Brad Pitt, unable to escape this ancestral cycle, kills his ship's crew too with full responsibility, not "by accident", since it's "the only way" to save the solar system.

In this alternate version, father and son would destroy each other and end up orbiting Neptune until they die. Pitt's escape jumping through Neptune's rings and reunion with his ex-wife is so unlikely (even for this movie) that it's probably just a hallucination as he runs out of oxygen.

Moral of the story: go talk with your dad on Neptune from time to time.
posted by haemanu at 3:22 PM on September 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


The film is shot quite nicely, both in visual effects and a pervasively sparse, watergate-era paranoid atmosphere.

That kept me engaged with trying to guess how the Lima Project's mission factored in to the energy-surges and how much the shadowy government was hiding/misinforming, especially with the advance blurbs citing the film as 2001 meets Apocalypse Now. Sadly, the film was uninterested in delivering an explanation -- much less a conclusion -- anywhere near as ambitious.
posted by ipe at 4:35 PM on September 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yeah the entire second half was working on dream logic and I was fully expecting an ambiguously hallucinatory climax after the drugs and relaxation rooms and neck patches but the movie didn't really bother.

I have a strong suspicion the movie was intended to end with everyone dead at Saturn but that they changed the ending at the last minute - look at how minimal everything related to landing on earth was, it could have all been done in editing.

Dad Astra.
posted by xiw at 5:14 PM on September 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


Gotta say, I can relate pretty hard to a protagonist willing to fly all the way to Neptune just so he can finally fight his old man.
posted by incomple at 6:16 PM on September 22, 2019 [10 favorites]


I'm just trying to figure out where space pirates live on the moon.

Also, it was affirming/disappointing to realize that there will still be Applebee's in the near future.
posted by MoonOrb at 9:24 PM on September 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


'ugh' to the science bullshit. The rotating-radar-launch was just. Too. Much. Orbital physics? Stop-on-a-dime deceleration?

The narrative *could* have worked without the plot weirdness.

Cut out the voice-over for a 20% better film.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:32 PM on September 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Maybe I've just seen Brad Pitt hallucinate too many movies, but I kept excusing the plot contrivances because I was presuming that some of them were his dream-logic, or the work of a conspiracy to eliminate witnesses around him.

I liked it, overall--gorgeous to look at and asking a real question at its core--but its plot is held together more by the strength of the other elements of the movie than by its own structural integrity.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:08 PM on September 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Haven't seen the finished film yet, but about two years ago, I had to read this script for work and then summarize it for my team, and I just remember having no idea if this movie was going to be any good or not. The script was bonkers in a way that I kind of admired — I had no clue where the plot was going the entire time, which at the very least, was refreshing. Lots of brand integration in that draft, especially in the moon arrival scene (in a way that felt like it was referencing 2001) and a happy ending that felt a little pat.
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:47 AM on September 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


You wouldn't think a movie with moon pirates and enraged space monkeys could bore me practically to tears but goddamn. Can I please have another long 20 second take of Sad Brad while he monotones about his sad life? Ruth Negga was the only interesting character in the film. And Natasha Lyonne, I guess, but she was only interesting in a "wait that's it? are we getting back to her?" kind of way.

Someone a few rows behind me in the theater sarcastically described it afterwards, in the credits: "See, he has to learn to let go of his father issues by literally letting go of his father."
posted by graventy at 11:49 AM on September 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


OKay so they thought they could mix Gravity with Solaris with Moon but never ask a tech expert about any real space science and hope that the audience would be fooled into thinking they'd gotten an M Night Shyamalan twist ending even though none was actually revealed.

My son and I agreed that the best dreamlike sequences were the ones that happened when we really were asleep during the movie.

2 hrs never seemed so long and 14 dollars never seemed so wasted.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:30 PM on September 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


"Handwavium" is my new favorite word.

Was blurry Liv Tyler his ex-wife? Or was "Eve" his most recent ex-girlfriend? In one of the scenes where the landscape of Pitt's face dominates the foreground, Eve's got a work messenger bag on one shoulder as she pointedly clinks a keyring on a table and walks out.

If you were married to the world's foremost hereditary astronaut, and he keeps escaping Earth's gravity using wasteful 20th-century technology to avoid your marital problems, and he can barely make out your voice over his relentless, pulse-rate-obsessed* internal narration during the 30-odd days a year he's breathing your air, don't you get the house?

*never above 80? what a sexual dynamo, that Oscar-baiting, vanity-showcasing excuse for a protagonist
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:09 PM on September 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


The Mr. and I went to the burbs to see this in one of the great big fancy theaters with "4D Xperience" stuff.

At first, I thought I was not enjoying the movie because my chair kept moving and puffs of air were being blown in my face to simulate falling from space. Then I thought it was the Dad behind me having a normal voice conversation with his kid about something completely unrelated to the movie. Then I thought it was the lady beside me checking her phone. But somewhere around rabid apes, I realized that it was just because the movie wasn't that good.

I did have the thought on the way home that while the movie was trying to paint the Space Com as this Big Bad that was trying to do Mean Things to Brad Pitt's daddy, it was actually trying to help him out. They didn't want him to see the message from Pops on Mars because Pops basically proved he was a raging asshole that would never stop, and who wants to share that information with the dude's kid? So they tried to protect him from being the one to kill his father, but Ruth Negga needed to get revenge for the loss of her parents, so she sent him to die or kill his father or both. Either way, it's a win-win for her.

In the end he murders three innocent astronauts, kills his dad, and returns home to his child bride and is a "better person" cause he's gonna think about his feelings? Sigh. No more movies in the Burbs and no more space madness movies for me.
posted by teleri025 at 2:42 PM on September 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


Someone heaved a deep sigh during a quiet part about 3/4 of the way through the movie, which I related to. I had already checked my watch when I thought it was about done and realized we had only been in there for an hour.

I want to say I liked it - the deliberate pacing, the visuals. But there were some things that were just so weird - moon pirates, The Hot Zone in Space, way too much splattering into airlocks, the total non-resolution of the father/son story, that once you start picking it apart, it's hard to stop.
posted by topophilia at 2:02 PM on October 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


The trailer made me think it was a space elevator, not an antenna. An antenna that size makes no sense at all when you have a lunar antenna and space based construction.

Why would you launch to the moon direct on a Saturn V equivalent rather than via a space plane
to LEO (seen in the falling scene) then LEO-lunar transit?

Why was the commercial space company Virgin Atlantic rather than Virgin Galactic?

Why would the US Space Command have their deep space launch facility in an isolated and unconnected area on the dark side of the moon?

Why did they the train/subway not go the whole way to the launch site?

And even if we accept no train, why did they drive rather than fly given low gravity/no air...?

Why would the US not effectively protect their convoy to the base?

Why did the deep space rocket not have any living space/exercise facilities?

Why was the Mars base interior design "dusty red" Why did the anechoic chamber have a window in the ceiling to show the stars? Wasn't this an "underground base" deep enough to be safe from the surges?

What does "only secure base" mean anyway when we're talking about electrical surges?

Why was he broadcasting live and why did it take so little time for the messages to reach Neptune and get back?

Why was there a lake with a rope to follow beneath the Mars launch site?

Why would you think duct tape would save the captain?

I assume they knew were the Lima project was from triangulating the reply signal, but why did Pitt put his ship into orbit on the opposite side of the rings from the Lima project?

Why did Pitt "kick" away his shuttle rather than just leave it orbiting alongside the Lima project airlock?

Would nuking the Lima project not just expose matter to antimatter anyway, triggering this whole destabilising of the solar system thing?

How did he manage to "push" through the rings without apparent thrust?

That's just what I can remember this morning. I enjoyed the aesthetic and am currently pretending it was all a dream which is helping.
posted by knapah at 3:14 AM on October 5, 2019 [17 favorites]


If your pulse never goes above 80 how do you do all those exercises where you get your heart rate to say 60-70% of max? That would be 48-56bpm. Is it physically possible to do any exercise and stay below 80bpm?

Someone heaved a deep sigh during a quiet part about 3/4 of the way through the movie, which I related to

You're lucky, I was sat in front of congenital whisperers, one of whom also liked to suck spit through their teeth every so often.
posted by biffa at 11:03 AM on October 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


It struck me that Pitt was basically playing the Michael Biehn role from The Abyss (doolally isolated military guy on remote base with nukes and refusing to see what's going on) and since we only have his word that his dad hadn't found evidence of alien life, he might even be the 'successful' version of that character.
posted by biffa at 3:20 PM on October 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


I thought this was weird, and kind of dumb, but admirable for trying something new. Sort of like Bad Times at the El Royale. One idea for going to Mars to record the voicemail: maybe there was something unique to having a live voice? Something the space force still was hoping might be salvaged from Lima? Getting McBride senior to turn off the pulse and navigate home from would salvge the ship and also mean no trip there. Otherwise no reason for McBride Jr. To go there to assassinate an old man. Steady pulse stuff is just a ruse - they were using him in a last ditch effort to save money.

Altogether I actually kind of liked it. The voice over felt forced and added at the last minute through focus group, though.
posted by codacorolla at 7:35 PM on October 7, 2019


For a movie that spends 90% of its running time showing us how gorgeous space is to end up with a moral of "You know what? Space, schmace. It's not all that; Earth is better" is ... not good.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 11:42 AM on October 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


Why entrust sweaty, fumble-fingered Loren Dean with the nuclear payload meant to ultimately save the earth?
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:50 PM on October 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


I thought it was lovely at times, but no amount of mumbling “temporary suspension of disbelief, temporary suspension of disbelief, temporary suspension of disbelief, ...” could do it for me
posted by TheShadowKnows at 4:54 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


God, this was bad. Just bad. To the point where I got mad that people got money for this and I wanted a refund.

I was trying to rack my brain for redeeming qualities afterwards. I mean, I guess it was nice to look at sometimes? But really when it went to SPACE MONKEYS I nearly lost it. If I’m perfectly honest, the opening words on screen were an immediate point of frustration. “To the stars” fading to “Ad Astra” was SO DAMN LAZY.

Also the continual recentering of cis white guys was so exhausting. There were women in this film, technically, but yeah. Yeah.

If you have a movie with just an A plot, and you’re banking it on just one person on screen throughout, your writing had better be airtight. This was not.
posted by hijinx at 7:55 AM on October 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


This reminded me of Game of Thrones. Lots of money thrown at it but such hubris and intellectual laziness that they don't even bother to get some unpaid physics adjunct to read their script
posted by tofu_crouton at 10:12 AM on October 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


SAD BASTRAD

on the one hand, yay, metaphoric space movies with haunted spaceships, er, astronauts! On the other, why ruin it with unexplained and unmotivated nonsense like space monkeys and moon pirates?

Honestly, I really love creepy psychological isolation drama set in space. I love Sunshine, I love Silent Running, I love 2001. I thought Interstellar was at least passable. I love Space: 1999, for the love of Luna! This year, in particular, I freakin’ LOVED High Life.

But what the fuck. I mean, side by side, High Life is objectively superior. You can kinda see the bones of a good movie under the silliness and lazy, lazy script beats (I mean, the movie actually borrows fragmentary bits of dialog from Apocalypse Now, just in case you missed the degree to which the plot was borrowing, not to mention the nonsensical moon pirates thing). It’s a metaphoric film about losing a father to career, dementia and old age. It could have been at least OK.

Somebody sic Topher on this for a sweet re-edit.
posted by mwhybark at 4:02 PM on December 7, 2019


Argh, this was bad. I mean, I like Heart of Darkness, I like Brad Pitt, I'm 100% on board for moon pirates and space apes, but give me something that holds together thematically. About the only things this movie got right were the mood and the visuals. Also light delay from Neptune to Mars is roughly four hours, your dad isn't going to get back to you that quickly.
posted by whir at 5:08 PM on December 7, 2019


Just wait until you’re pushing 40, four hours is like a reaction time test

(no idea of your actual age, happy to join in mocking this film)
posted by mwhybark at 5:11 PM on December 7, 2019


One of the user reviews for this on IMDB: Brad goes to Neptune but the script comes from Uranus
posted by whir at 5:12 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


Just got done watching a copy my brother bought for the family to see. I wanted to like it, and it definitely looked great, but goddamn did I hate it by the end. Plugging it into my Flickchart, I can say it isn't in my bottom 10 most hated movies, but only because it's #11.

The worldbuilding made no sense. The plot made no sense. The writing was mediocre at best. The emotional crux of the movie was built on a confrontation between two emotionally flat characters whose relationship the rest of the movie utterly failed to build up. And it continually felt like they tried to paper over these fundamental flaws with faux gravitas like the long silent shots and increasingly tedious narration and the visual nods to far better movies.

And they seemingly couldn't go fifteen minutes without throwing out another absurdly implausible plot twist.

Antimatter surges!
Moon pirates!
Heart attacks!
SPACE BABOONS!
The Martian commander is mad his dad killed her dad, but hey, why not help him reconcile anyways!
Sneaking aboard a ship, and then accidentally killing THE ENTIRE CREW in like 90 seconds!
Crazy dad offs himself!
Boogie board through Neptune's rings!
SURF THE NUCLEAR FIRE!!!

Ad Astra? More like BAD ASS-TRA(sh).
posted by Rhaomi at 8:21 PM on December 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


the judges would've accepted bad as(h)-tra(y), pottymouth

I'm glassy on cold meds and weirdly jubilant, because my cinéaste brother had just two "must-see" movies on this year's fall list, this one and Knives Out, and I correctly guessed his reactions to both.

Have you seen Knives Out, Rhaomi? Ad Astray was a letdown (gods they had so much MONEY why did none of it go to good script docs), but check out Knives Out, which has a handful of sets and a cast full of people having a good time. (Rather than D. Sutherland, cheese standing alone: promised moon piracy, bitterly disappointed when wardrobe couldn't rustle up so much as a beta-cloth eyepatch, yet making the best of the inscrutable gossamer he was given. Canadians are a flinty lot.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:50 PM on December 29, 2019


I haven't, but I loved Johnson's Breaking Bad work and stand firmly on his side of the Star Wars sequel divide, so it's definitely going on my "to-watch" list, thanks!
posted by Rhaomi at 11:28 AM on December 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


This has an 84% RT critics score lmao.

I didn't think it was going to be great, but it was shockingly terrible, my God.
posted by fleacircus at 10:52 PM on February 10, 2020 [4 favorites]


I'm still at a loss as to why so many critics, including many I respect, loved this movie? I can't think of a recent film where my experience was so at odds with the critical consensus.
posted by octothorpe at 10:23 AM on February 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


Same. I'm very confused.

Perhaps Terrence Malick habituated critics into thinking ponderous voiceovers implies artistic significance.
posted by fleacircus at 1:35 PM on February 11, 2020


fleacircus: "This has an 84% RT critics score lmao.

I didn't think it was going to be great, but it was shockingly terrible, my God.
"

Even stranger when considering the very mediocre 40% user score (Metacritic has a similarly wide critic/review split, at 80/6.2). I usually land on the critic's side of such divides, or at least can appreciate why they like it when broader audiences don't, but I'm legit baffled at what anybody saw in this thing beyond the visuals.
posted by Rhaomi at 4:13 PM on February 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


The sad thing is, I went into this knowing I'd be disappointed because every Prestige Space Movie must have some ponderous combination of religion-in-space, daddy issues, and/or an epistemological crisis, capped off by a deus ex machina.

The production design was beautiful and the and sound design was great. I thought a lot of scenes would be very effective had there been a decent plot.

The Neptune ring thing was incredibly dumb. The whole last act, really.

Apocalypse Now in Spaaace could be really good if done whole-assedly.

Also: what was the point of the Donald Sutherland character?
posted by condour75 at 7:54 PM on February 13, 2020 [3 favorites]


The waste of Donald Sutherland was baffling. He showed up, and for a searing-hot second I thought he'd shake out as Brad's biological father. Or, as a time-travelling/alternate universe Brad Pitt, determined to save his own life? But, no.

T. Pruitt: I knew your dad. We were close, he and I. We started out together, went to Purdue together.... which you well know, since I became like a second father to you, when he abandoned your family for Neptune's allure, with your poor mother so ill... aw, I keed! [Ruffles 50-year-old Brad Pitt's hair]. Whoops, it's my bum ticker, here, take this thumb drive o' classified SpaceCom comms, fingers crossed you can access this crusty tech somewhere private, Slugger. [*Dies*, having goosed the plot a skosh.]

Man. Say Sutherland had assumed voice-over duties at that point, so that the hapless audience-goer wondered at the time-traveler possibility, or whether some sort of soul transference had taken place, or that an alien -- point is, I'd have gone along? And probably been in a more charitable frame of mind for subsequent space-baboon tomfoolery.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:17 PM on February 13, 2020 [1 favorite]


The rave reviews tricked me, too. What an incoherent, cold film.

The director's previous effort, The Lost City of Z, was - despite radically different subject matter - almost exactly as ponderous, gorgeously shot, critically loved but popularly ignored, and about a dude who's kind of a cipher, kind of a raging asshole, and every other character is wafer thin.

It's kind of amazing the director fucked up in almost exactly the same way both times.
posted by smoke at 5:19 AM on February 16, 2020 [1 favorite]


I didn't like Lost City of Z either, but I thought its biopic nature might explain the stumbling story.

Maybe it's just that I don't meet halfway the Dad-feels plots, but the Overinvested gals usually don't either, yet they liked Ad Astra. There's some quality to James Gray's directing that a lot of critics love. I don't know what it is.
posted by fleacircus at 3:06 PM on February 16, 2020


Started watching this last night on the strength of the reviews. Wow, it's so dumb! Yes, I should have read this thread first. I got as far as the space monkeys and bailed... I guess I'm in good company; Chris Hadfield hated it too.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:27 AM on May 13, 2020 [3 favorites]


Brad Pitt is 56 and so Tommy Lee Jones has been at Neptune for forty years? I mean the thing is, Brad Pitt is starting to look awfully old for a Major who’s mostly known for his father...

In general if you’re asking this questions the film has failed somewhere earlier in its run time... I’m not sure where that was though... the beginning sequences were so captivating...
posted by midmarch snowman at 8:13 AM on August 31, 2020


This might be the most frustrating movie I've ever seen. I can't think of another movie where I enjoyed it so much during the first two-thirds and then utterly hated the last act. The first two acts were gorgeously shot space porn that looked fantastic, to the point where I said that I regretted not actually seeing this movie on the big screen. I looked past the lunacy of moon pirates (there were background hints that farside is disputed territory; I can imagine that they were actually from a rival nation-state and called pirates out of discretion either in-universe or meta); I accepted that biological research in space could go horribly awry (and that the research vessel was also on a similar transfer orbit between the moon and Mars, so it was less stopping in space and more matching velocities). I loved the set design, especially the Mars colony looking like it was hewn from rough concrete. I'm not even going to get too mad about bad orbital mechanics because orbital mechanics are hard and even harder to do well for dramatic purposes (Gravity, for all its realism, is extremely bad about this as well).

But leaving Mars, goddamn. Having your supposedly sympathetic main character kill off three people he'd spent the previous seven weeks with is a choice. Somebody upthread mentioned that the only thing that makes sense is that everything after that is a fugue state, as McBride continues to unravel psychologically; I was honestly shocked when Pitt was able to physically touch Tommy Lee Jones because I was so sure he was a hallucination. How does someone stay alive, in solitude and in an artificial environment, for thirty or forty years? And yet so little happens during the final thirty minutes of this movie that we just kind of ... stopped paying attention to it.

I don't know if an alternate ending could have salvaged this movie--I think you need an entirely different third act. But I cannot for the life of me figure out what it would be.
posted by thecaddy at 9:28 AM on September 11, 2020 [4 favorites]


Ugh. Like many here, I'm mainly angry at Rotten Tomatoes to have led me so badly astray.

As for the movie, well, if your message is "all we have is people," your movie should really have some people in it.
posted by chortly at 9:57 PM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


UGH. LIKE MANY HERE, I'M MAINLY ANGRY AT ROTTEN TOMATOES TO HAVE
LED ME SO BADLY ASTRAY.


          BADLY ASTRAY


           AD   ASTRA

posted by Rhaomi at 12:08 PM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Coming to this years later, I can't find the room in my heart to hate this film. The script wasn't great and the science is barely even related to reality, but it is a good looking film and for me, anyway, it did what art is supposed to do: make you feel something. In this case a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection. I'm pretty sure that's what they were going for, so in that sense it worked.

Basically, Sad Brad managed to salvage the script by making the viewer feel something even though he was given shit material and the cinematographers, costumers and set designers managed to make something visually stunning. However, like Roy, my heart rate was stable throughout, despite the attempts at action. Also, I understood what they were trying to do with the commercialization of the moon and the fraught (to put it mildly) political situation, but it just seemed out of place and didn't land.

All in all I'd say that it's a film that contains both extremes that averages out to a middling movie. That said, I can see how someone who doesn't watch as many shit tier movies as I do might grade it more harshly.
posted by wierdo at 1:10 AM on August 9, 2023


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