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Ad Astra

Ad Astra. James Gray. 2019. ⚁

For a moment, I was worried that this was going to be one of those interminable real space movies instead of sci-fi. *phew* It’s sci-fi!

Brad Pitt is getting a scraggly face, and it suits him. Especially in 4K, where you can see all the laugh lines and tiny wrinkles.

[twenty minutes pass]

Well, OK, the cinematography is very… modern… That is, every scene is colour-graded to an inch. It’s not that it doesn’t look good — it does — but it’s a bit boring visually. It’s so… controlled.

The actors are really working at making everything all modern and sombre, too. Nobody speaks in their natural register, but pitch their voices as low as they will go.

[ten minutes pass]

Oh, now it’s just stupid. A highway robbery on the Moon? This is not a past-scarcity movie or where major sci-fi technological breakthroughs have been made (I think), so just getting all those resources up to the Moon, and then staging a moon buggy ambush, just to… er… rob them? When any tear in their suits mean that they’re dead? It’s almost unbelievable moronic. I mean, by the filmmakers. And of course almost everybody dies, because that is what would happen in a situation like that. I guess that’s realistic?

[five minutes pass]

This is in-credibly boring. So of course:

If all the reviewers like a sci-fi movie, you pretty much know that it’s going to be pure tedium: All character development (i.e., daddy issues, because that’s the only character development allowed) and no fun.

[ten minutes pass]

This may be the most moronic movie I’ve seen in quite a while, and I watched Scary Movie 2 yesterday. He opened up the door to vacuum and the primate exploded? I thought they’d stopped doing that a couple of decades ago. (Because that’s not a thing.) And, yes, the primate had… crushed the space helmet of a guy? What?

Why is there zero G on the ship, anyway? On all the shots, it looked like it was under acceleration?

This is a sci-fi movie for people who’ve never seen, or wanted to see, a sci-fi movie, I guess.

[the end]

It’s really a ⚀ movie: It’s unimaginably boring and it’s stupid as nothing you’ve seen, and it’s pretentious and portentous.

But it’s got some nice shots.

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