Ad Astra (2019)

Top comments

1. 

   Siskoid

   Despite feeling like an introspective space drama, Ad Astra is really action-packed and works as an adventure movie in a future very well-derived from the space programs we have now. If there are plans for it, they're in this movie and they feel like exactly what would happen (and how it would LOOK) if we keep investing in space. The realism is perhaps the film's greatest strength, taking its cue from 2001's second act and actively showing us the future, making it look brilliant, and using real physics to complement the experience (the way sound works is especially well done). It's also a father-son story writ large, about a deadbeat dad who left his family and never looked back, and a son who's had to live in his father's shadow and has only nominally learned to deal with it by ignoring it rather than facing it. The entire journey, across an impossible distance, is a therapy session (which sometimes dovetails into narration, a cinema sin when it's all pretty obvious) in a world where space travelers are constantly required to keep in chill. Mental health, one of this century's big concerns, has its fingerprints all over this. And then you can also look at it from orbit and see that questions of isolation and interconnectivity are really broader human issues, and that human pettiness is at odds with human reality in the grander scheme, the need to reconnect with a father really the need to connect with people as a whole, as opposed to seeking something else, something necessarily better to our misanthropic idea of humanity, out there. In the film, that's the cosmos, but in our world, it may be fiction, or hobbies, or materialism, or whatever. Ad Astra is pretty thought-provoking for what is on the surface of it an exciting space adventure. 4 years 6 months ago
2. 

   Minamu

   If you love the high speed tempo of 2001, Blade Runner, and the original Solaris, you will also love this stepchild :) I certainly did, it was great. 4 years 7 months ago
3. 

   DisneyStitch

   Ok so first the good stuff. Visuals are pretty brilliant, and there were many scenes where I felt truly isolated and exposed out in space on the other side of the solar system. The soundtrack also did a great job of backing up what was being shown. Very ethereal and not over the top at all. That brings us to the bad. The theme of the movie is essentially a father/son plotline, though it doesn't focus well enough on it for it to carry the film, and the script needed a bit of work. It's eye candy to the max, but the foundations are lackluster. In the end we are left with a bunch of odd scenarios in space that Brad Pitt finds himself in and Tommy Lee Jones as a kind of space hermit who isn't quite crazy but hardly interesting.
   
   There were many points in the movie where the plot could have gone the cliché route but opted not to. The almost humorous part is that the cliché option would have probably made more sense and also have been more interesting.

   Perfect example of this are the mysterious "surges" emanating from the Lima Project. The more interesting (albeit cliché) explanation would have probably been his father disillusioned with his search for ET's and deciding to wipe out the human race for some kooky reason. Instead it's just a weird effect from the mutiny, just a technological glitch at best. It truly felt like the mystery and reasoning as to why the "surges" were happening was a driving point in the film, but ultimately it comes to nothing.

   3 years 7 months ago

Friends