- #1
member 656954
If you've seen it, what did you think?
And that's why I can't wait for Will Smith's upcoming Gemini Man. I'm not expecting anything but silly fun from that, a sci-fi action adventure that moves so fast you don't have time to worry about the plot holes. Smith is no Pitt, but that's okay. Hopefully, Gemini Man won't be an Ad Astra either, and I'm come out of the cinema smiling, not scowling.
Ad Astra is clearly a big budget affair, $80 million worth of big, and has a big name star - Brad Pitt - attached as loner astronaut Roy McBride. McBride is almost the archetypal 'Man with No Name' character - tough, self contained, aloof, and so emotionally detached that his pulse never goes above 80 bpm no matter the situation - though whether his character is nature or nurture is never adequately resolved and probably does not matter for the message the movie hamfistedly conveys.
We first meet McBride as he prepares himself for a mission that I took to be LEO based, but turns out Roy is on some kind of crazy tall but attached to the ground antenna looking for alien signals - I think! - when a power surge causes structural problems that kicks Roy off the antenna and sends him falling to Earth. The trailer makes it seem that Roy miraculously survives a Felix Baumgartner-like stunt, and I went into the movie wondering about that, but the solution presented seems a cheat, actually.
The improbable nature of the sequence is, however, a signal of things to come in a thinly written plot laden with numerous WTF moments...
It seems that the power surge was caused by events happening near far off Neptune, and - shock, surprise - Roy's supposed-to-be-dead father might be involved. At least, it's a surprise to Roy. That's because his father, H. Clifford McBride, is also an astronaut, but he's the astronaut, the most decorated, most revered astronaut ever, commander of the Lima Project, a mission to travel beyond the Sun's heliosphere searching for aliens. As the song says, Baby, that was years ago, and according to everything Roy knows, his father, and everyone else on the mission, died in the outer solar system in circumstances that if they were mentioned, I didn't catch.
I also didn't really understand the reason why a search for alien life has to be conducted beyond the Sun's magnetic influence. It was the type of gobbledygook that probably sounded convincing to the writers, James Gray (who also produced, that shouldn't be allowed, where's the subjectivity?) and Ethan Gross (who worked on Fringe so should have known better), but there's no evidence that a science advisor was involved with this hot mess, so anyone watching the film with even a cursory knowledge of science will likely have been wincing as this theme is played out.
My friend Dave, who I saw the movie with, doesn't have a background in science (he's actually a cinematographer) and even he asked me about it afterward, wondering about the 'why' of such an extreme act of idiocy, but sadly, it's merely one such item of gobbledygook, which ranges from an underground lake on Mars that appears to have leaves floating in it (along with an inexplicable guide wire that Roy uses to pull himself along) to Roy using a makeshift shield to traverse the fast moving rubble in the rings of Neptune, to a complete lack of orbital mechanics.
Searching for aliens is a recurring theme in the movie and while it makes no more sense than anything else that happens so you just have to go with it, it is the basis for McBride Snr's entire characterization. I get that McBride Snr. might be a nutty guy, but the opening looking-for-aliens sequence confirms that the nuttiness goes beyond his tenuous mental state. That his tenuous mental state apparently came as a surprise to the SpaceCom (aka NASA) psychologists is just another item you have to park, because really, wouldn't any professional shrink worth employing have noticed over the years that their leading light astronaut superstar is actually an alien-loving fruitcake with serious issues? Apparently not!
McBride Snr. is played by industry veteran Tommy Lee Jones, and despite the big budget, it didn't appear that a dime was spent on any fancy 'youthenizer' tech to make saggy old Tommy look decades younger for the retrospective flashes, which was disconcerting. Not nearly as disconcerting as the monkeys in space sequence though. I'm not going to explain that, you'll have to see the movie, but honestly, it was as ludicrous as Matt Damon's cameo in Interstellar and just about as obvious a plot device.
Going back to those power surges, they are somehow caused by antimatter, which the Lima Project used, and for reasons glossed over because...well, they make no sense so you'd have to gloss over them, wouldn't you...have the power to destroy life on Earth and possibly the universe along with it!
<Cue the dramatic tension>
Given the imminent threat, Roy agrees to travel to Mars (because the power surge has fried all other comms stations, yet we see Roy et al talking via radio to mission control on numerous instances, but sure, why not!) to try and signal his father who is apparently orbiting Neptune and engage him in what would have to be the worst reunion conversation ever. But to get to Mars, Roy has to leave from the Moon, and that involves yet another bizarre sequence where dastardly bad guys on lunar rovers attack Roy and his team on their lunar rovers in the so-called "no man's land" that is somehow placed between the large Moon base and the Mars launch pad. It MAKES NO SENSE and is another stupidly conceived action sequence that highlights how cool under pressure Roy is. Because seriously, knowing no man's land is there - and they do, they even warn Roy about it - surely SpaceCom could have just used a hopper and flown him the few miles to the launch pad and avoided any Moon Pirates? (I'm entirely ignoring the economics of 'pirates' on the Moon. It's not like you can get there easily, or survive 'off the land', and they seemed intent on destroying Roy's lunar rover, so they were clearly not of the Somalian school of pirating.)
Thinking on this sequence later, Dave and I discussed the Reavers in Joss Whedon's outstanding Serenity, noting that motivating the pirates in Ad Astra in a similar "loony" fashion would have at least provided a reason for their actions, as flimsy as that might have been. But it seems that the point of Ad Astra was so compelling to the production team that nobody was asking "Hmm, does that make any sense?" allowing way too much dumb stuff to slip through.
Interestingly, while Ad Astra lovingly portrays weightlessness in a realistic fashion, gravity on the Moon and Mars appear to be conveniently Earth-normal (apart from the lunar rover sequence), so Brad does not have to emulate Neil Armstrong's hop-shuffle. That inconsistent adoption of physics is pretty typical of science fiction movies these days, and I guess directors figure audiences don't care enough that they won't buy a ticket, but we do, it's annoying to watch and given the budget, there's no reason for it apart from laziness and my thoughts are typical of other viewers in hating the stupidity in the 'science'.
I'm running out of critical puff to go through the rest of this excruciating story step by step, but suffice to say, it never gets better. The strange action sequences are interspersed with way too much of Roy's heavy breathing, his confused internal narrative, and snippets from his past that torment him. It's fair to say that while Roy goes a little nutty on the quick trip to Neptune, he's never as far off the deep end as Daddy dearest. I will note though, that having spent most of the movie getting to his father, apparently there were not enough cans of 35mm film left for the McBride's Snr. and Jr. to properly engage before Roy has to have to drop Dad down a gravity well and then destroy his one true home to save the day. If I tell you that Finding Nemo covers father / son attachment issues better than the McBride's it will probably give you some idea of how much of a confused moment you're going to encounter in the dying minutes of the movie.
So, what is Ad Astra all about? It's basically two hours and $80m to remind us (and men especially, presumably) that being connected to others is healthier than walling yourself off. Because men are the target audience, we need science fiction. And because science fiction isn't real, they apparently have liberty to go heavy on the fiction and light on the science, to the detriment of the story, and thus the viewer. <sigh>
I really didn't like Ad Astra. It wasted a lot of money and Pitt's acting skills, and to be perfectly honest, highlighted that film makers have learned not much since Kubrick took us on any equally visually exquisite but entirely ponderous solar system outing in 1968. Ad Astra steals a lot from 2001: A Space Odyssey (including monkeys), but Kubrick at least had the brilliance of Arthur C. Clarke to springboard the story off.
Ultimately, any movie is personal taste. But I'm thinking that if you care about the science in your science fiction, then watching Ad Astra is likely to drive you nuts. There are just too many moments when science - and common sense - are chucked out the window for nebulous plot reasons. It's a shame, but I think the intent was a momentous #MenToo movie of some kind. If so, the hastag is more FailedEffort than FantasticOutcome.
We first meet McBride as he prepares himself for a mission that I took to be LEO based, but turns out Roy is on some kind of crazy tall but attached to the ground antenna looking for alien signals - I think! - when a power surge causes structural problems that kicks Roy off the antenna and sends him falling to Earth. The trailer makes it seem that Roy miraculously survives a Felix Baumgartner-like stunt, and I went into the movie wondering about that, but the solution presented seems a cheat, actually.
The improbable nature of the sequence is, however, a signal of things to come in a thinly written plot laden with numerous WTF moments...
It seems that the power surge was caused by events happening near far off Neptune, and - shock, surprise - Roy's supposed-to-be-dead father might be involved. At least, it's a surprise to Roy. That's because his father, H. Clifford McBride, is also an astronaut, but he's the astronaut, the most decorated, most revered astronaut ever, commander of the Lima Project, a mission to travel beyond the Sun's heliosphere searching for aliens. As the song says, Baby, that was years ago, and according to everything Roy knows, his father, and everyone else on the mission, died in the outer solar system in circumstances that if they were mentioned, I didn't catch.
I also didn't really understand the reason why a search for alien life has to be conducted beyond the Sun's magnetic influence. It was the type of gobbledygook that probably sounded convincing to the writers, James Gray (who also produced, that shouldn't be allowed, where's the subjectivity?) and Ethan Gross (who worked on Fringe so should have known better), but there's no evidence that a science advisor was involved with this hot mess, so anyone watching the film with even a cursory knowledge of science will likely have been wincing as this theme is played out.
My friend Dave, who I saw the movie with, doesn't have a background in science (he's actually a cinematographer) and even he asked me about it afterward, wondering about the 'why' of such an extreme act of idiocy, but sadly, it's merely one such item of gobbledygook, which ranges from an underground lake on Mars that appears to have leaves floating in it (along with an inexplicable guide wire that Roy uses to pull himself along) to Roy using a makeshift shield to traverse the fast moving rubble in the rings of Neptune, to a complete lack of orbital mechanics.
Searching for aliens is a recurring theme in the movie and while it makes no more sense than anything else that happens so you just have to go with it, it is the basis for McBride Snr's entire characterization. I get that McBride Snr. might be a nutty guy, but the opening looking-for-aliens sequence confirms that the nuttiness goes beyond his tenuous mental state. That his tenuous mental state apparently came as a surprise to the SpaceCom (aka NASA) psychologists is just another item you have to park, because really, wouldn't any professional shrink worth employing have noticed over the years that their leading light astronaut superstar is actually an alien-loving fruitcake with serious issues? Apparently not!
McBride Snr. is played by industry veteran Tommy Lee Jones, and despite the big budget, it didn't appear that a dime was spent on any fancy 'youthenizer' tech to make saggy old Tommy look decades younger for the retrospective flashes, which was disconcerting. Not nearly as disconcerting as the monkeys in space sequence though. I'm not going to explain that, you'll have to see the movie, but honestly, it was as ludicrous as Matt Damon's cameo in Interstellar and just about as obvious a plot device.
Going back to those power surges, they are somehow caused by antimatter, which the Lima Project used, and for reasons glossed over because...well, they make no sense so you'd have to gloss over them, wouldn't you...have the power to destroy life on Earth and possibly the universe along with it!
<Cue the dramatic tension>
Given the imminent threat, Roy agrees to travel to Mars (because the power surge has fried all other comms stations, yet we see Roy et al talking via radio to mission control on numerous instances, but sure, why not!) to try and signal his father who is apparently orbiting Neptune and engage him in what would have to be the worst reunion conversation ever. But to get to Mars, Roy has to leave from the Moon, and that involves yet another bizarre sequence where dastardly bad guys on lunar rovers attack Roy and his team on their lunar rovers in the so-called "no man's land" that is somehow placed between the large Moon base and the Mars launch pad. It MAKES NO SENSE and is another stupidly conceived action sequence that highlights how cool under pressure Roy is. Because seriously, knowing no man's land is there - and they do, they even warn Roy about it - surely SpaceCom could have just used a hopper and flown him the few miles to the launch pad and avoided any Moon Pirates? (I'm entirely ignoring the economics of 'pirates' on the Moon. It's not like you can get there easily, or survive 'off the land', and they seemed intent on destroying Roy's lunar rover, so they were clearly not of the Somalian school of pirating.)
Thinking on this sequence later, Dave and I discussed the Reavers in Joss Whedon's outstanding Serenity, noting that motivating the pirates in Ad Astra in a similar "loony" fashion would have at least provided a reason for their actions, as flimsy as that might have been. But it seems that the point of Ad Astra was so compelling to the production team that nobody was asking "Hmm, does that make any sense?" allowing way too much dumb stuff to slip through.
Interestingly, while Ad Astra lovingly portrays weightlessness in a realistic fashion, gravity on the Moon and Mars appear to be conveniently Earth-normal (apart from the lunar rover sequence), so Brad does not have to emulate Neil Armstrong's hop-shuffle. That inconsistent adoption of physics is pretty typical of science fiction movies these days, and I guess directors figure audiences don't care enough that they won't buy a ticket, but we do, it's annoying to watch and given the budget, there's no reason for it apart from laziness and my thoughts are typical of other viewers in hating the stupidity in the 'science'.
I'm running out of critical puff to go through the rest of this excruciating story step by step, but suffice to say, it never gets better. The strange action sequences are interspersed with way too much of Roy's heavy breathing, his confused internal narrative, and snippets from his past that torment him. It's fair to say that while Roy goes a little nutty on the quick trip to Neptune, he's never as far off the deep end as Daddy dearest. I will note though, that having spent most of the movie getting to his father, apparently there were not enough cans of 35mm film left for the McBride's Snr. and Jr. to properly engage before Roy has to have to drop Dad down a gravity well and then destroy his one true home to save the day. If I tell you that Finding Nemo covers father / son attachment issues better than the McBride's it will probably give you some idea of how much of a confused moment you're going to encounter in the dying minutes of the movie.
So, what is Ad Astra all about? It's basically two hours and $80m to remind us (and men especially, presumably) that being connected to others is healthier than walling yourself off. Because men are the target audience, we need science fiction. And because science fiction isn't real, they apparently have liberty to go heavy on the fiction and light on the science, to the detriment of the story, and thus the viewer. <sigh>
I really didn't like Ad Astra. It wasted a lot of money and Pitt's acting skills, and to be perfectly honest, highlighted that film makers have learned not much since Kubrick took us on any equally visually exquisite but entirely ponderous solar system outing in 1968. Ad Astra steals a lot from 2001: A Space Odyssey (including monkeys), but Kubrick at least had the brilliance of Arthur C. Clarke to springboard the story off.
Ultimately, any movie is personal taste. But I'm thinking that if you care about the science in your science fiction, then watching Ad Astra is likely to drive you nuts. There are just too many moments when science - and common sense - are chucked out the window for nebulous plot reasons. It's a shame, but I think the intent was a momentous #MenToo movie of some kind. If so, the hastag is more FailedEffort than FantasticOutcome.
And that's why I can't wait for Will Smith's upcoming Gemini Man. I'm not expecting anything but silly fun from that, a sci-fi action adventure that moves so fast you don't have time to worry about the plot holes. Smith is no Pitt, but that's okay. Hopefully, Gemini Man won't be an Ad Astra either, and I'm come out of the cinema smiling, not scowling.
