Per Ardua Ad Astra - through struggle, the stars - is the motto of the Royal Air Force. Brad Pitt certainly gets some adversity to struggle with in this movie, but the main problem is that no-one has any idea why.
I saw this in 4DX, which is totally inaccurate. The image is very much two dimensional, while the accompanying extra effects (strobe lighting, wind, air jets, and of course the seat movement) wouldn't classify as a dimension by even the most diehard pseuodscientist. So it really should have been called 2DX, but apparently it wasn't. Ah well.
Anyway, the plot of the movies a bit like this. Having survived Aragorn's timely death and developed a niche fetish for doomed astronauts, Liv Tyler has become somewhat vaguely estranged from latest husband Brad Pitt. The US Space Force get wind of this and decide to lend a hand, so they send Pitt off to make contact with his long-lost dad. Along the way he encounters bandits on the Moon, vicious space monkeys, and he murders a bunch of people for no good reason. It only takes him 3 months to get to Neptune* where his dad is blasting the inner Solar System with radiation because Fuck You Earth, or something. Then be physically hurls dear old dad off into deep space, blows up the space station, and returns home to a heroes' welcome and a no longer estranged Liv Tyler. Everyone cheerfully forgets about the bit where he murders a bunch of people and they all live happily ever after.
*One wonders why no-one bothered sending any other missions given that dad Tommy Lee Jones - alien hunter - has been radio silent for 16 years at this point. Did they just keep putting it off ? Did they forget about him and suddenly remember ?
I swear I'm not making this up.
It's a thoroughly strange film that doesn't quite know what it wants to be, except perhaps Gravity with Brad Pitt instead of George Clooney and space monkeys in place of an actual plot. The remarkable thing in that for the first third of the film or so it quite expertly pulls the wool over the audience's eyes and comes across as having huge potential. The cinematography is excellent and it's brilliantly understated. The score conveys a sense of seriousness to the visually impressive on-screen antics as Pitt falls off a collapsing antenna and then has a car chase on the Moon. It feels like there's a bigger point to the whole thing and that we're going to get a very satisfying emotional finish. Perhaps Jones' aliens will show up and give us a nice moral message or something.
But they don't. By the time we get to the Norwegian (and therefore viking) space monkeys, the mask slips and it's pretty clear the movie has no idea what the hell is going on. Surrealism ? No no, it's just bad writing. There's this space station sending out a distress call so they go and investigate. Turns out there are escaped research primates on board who are none too happy, and they try and bite poor Brad Pitt in the face but don't, so he runs back to the spaceship and flies off. The only consequence is that they kill the captain so Pitt gets to be in charge, but that's it.
Why are there space monkeys anyway ? Why is it a Norwegian space station, of all countries ? Where are the bodies of the crew - did the monkeys eat them ? Nobody feels the need to explain this. Like the car chase on the Moon, it's a lot of fun to watch, but ultimately it doesn't advance the plot in the slightest.
The lunar car chase thing happens because Pitt has to take a rocket first from Earth and then to the Moon and finally to Mars, but the military rockets are on the far side of the Moon so there's a bit of driving involved. Why they couldn't (a) take a small rocket around to the other side or (b) take an armoured vehicle, knowing there are Moon bandits about, or (c) why are people fighting over resources given that humanity has opened up the wealth of the Solar System anyway ? It's both completely unnecessary and makes no sense. But it's nice to look at.
So, for that matter, is the fact that Pitt has to go to Mars to send a transmission to Jones. Thing is, it's a laser-based communication system so there won't be any radio frequency interference to worry about : he'd have been better off staying on the Moon - which no atmosphere - than dusty old Mars. The Mars sequence has some nice Blade Runner style cinematics, but why does the transmission need to be in an anechoic chamber ? He's just speaking into a desktop microphone - just shut the door and tell everyone you're recording.
Then, when no response is received, the Space Force decide that Pitt isn't required on the mission to Neptune to stop Jones, so he boards the ship anyway and somehow manages to kill everyone. I'm not quite sure exactly how that happens, but it does.
From this point on the film was largely rescued by the 4DX, which has hitherto been making a very strange but occasionally good film excellent. Watching Pitt climb over the edge of the antenna at the start and having the seat tilt forward is great fun. Feeling the seat rumble during the driving sequences works well, as does the slow rotation during the floaty zero-g shots. It's a fun gimmick, but it does add something. Lots of fun and very silly - well worth trying out.
The first third or so of the film comes across as a potential masterpiece. The middle section becomes a broken mass of high quality set pieces with no underlying structure and a strange mixture of the serious and the silly. Alas, the final section of the movie is saved only by the 4DX. It becomes needlessly slow and grim and Jones' central mission of looking for aliens becomes a minor side issue. Jones' has apparently become a murdering psychopath, but is totally indifferent to the sudden arrival of his estranged son. We learn next to nothing about his alien-finding mission or what drove him to become a murderous maniac. It's not even clear if what follows between them is conflict or reconciliation. We get plenty of per ardua but absolutely no ad astra - as usual, the opportunity to tell us something really interesting, to try and unify the science with the humanism, is completely wasted.
Arguably the strangest part of the movie is the final scene, in which Pitt describes how he's reunited with his wife and everything's fine again. He doesn't even have any bad dreams. WELL WHY THE HELL NOT, BRAD, YOU MURDERED A BUNCH OF PEOPLE ! It makes sense enough that Space Command would cover up their two darlings actually turning out to be murdering bastards, but not that Pitt's character wouldn't come back traumatised. It's established from the word go that this is a guy who remains cool under immense pressure, but we also get a sense of him being deeply troubled by... something, which is then resolved, somehow. By him fighting space monkeys and hurling his father off into deep space, apparently. Yes, because fighting monkeys and hurling your father to his death in deep space are well-known ways of dealing with a traumatic childhood. Ho hum.
Overall, I give this movie 6/10. As long as you don't think too hard, the first third - maybe even two thirds - are very enjoyable. But in the end, Ad Astra is no more than a bunch of excellent, visually impressive set pieces strung together with the narrative consistency of wet haddock. It's not awful - it's just really weird. It could have been boosted to 7/10 with an alternative title such as, "Brad Pitt Is In A Car Chase On The Moon" or perhaps simply, "Brad Pitt And The Space Monkeys". A missed opportunity indeed.
Now that I've found commenting is working I can go back and say a few things I desperately wanetd to say back when posts were new...
ReplyDeleteI watched Ad astra and thought you might appreciate my rant about said film, for me this is probably the most practical online place to share my thoughts on this particular subject. Look forward to future posts of yours.
Ad astra was a pretty rotten film. The worst thing was the unsatisfying ending, the climax is simply the main character having a minor kerfuffle with his father which is then followed by him returning home and nothing of any importance changing. We follow the whole film seeing the problems of civilisation as it spreads thrugh the solar system, fighting over resources, guard dogs on the moon, frankly idiotic infrastructure decisions... and does the end give some amazing solution to all this? No the ending just has an astronaut deciding to be bit more friendly with his, wife(?or is she someone else). For a title like Ad Astra you expect a conclusions which chanegs the evry world in which it began, not a mere personal reflection by one bloke. There was serious potential here to have an ending where the father hadn't gone mad and had made some finding that someone on earth was trying to suppress, or atleast an ending where people no longer find themselves permanently attached to emotion monitoring devices... Or maybe an ending with a decisive war, or a decisive peace, or a proper understanding of what the surges were, or the ground layed for an expansion beyond the solar system or proper exploitation of the asteroids (after which the resource wars would be a lot less worth the while of either party involved)...
continued next post...
I completely agree. "Through Struggle, The Wife" would have been a legitimately better (if problematic) title. Reading back over this I'm thinking, "damn that must have been some good 4D !". Useless movie.
Deletefollowing on from my last post...
ReplyDeleteInfact the reel of (supposedly exoplanetary) images which runs after the fight with the father is primarily of Jupiter's moons, especially Callisto and Europa, the conclusions could be "ooh lets go and put submerged colonies on Europa, where we've got all that lovely water to work with","we don't need to look out there for ET, he's an algal bloom causing brown patches on Europa's surface". As well as a dis-satosfying conclsion the science in the sci-fi is pretty bad too, why send a bloke to Mars to record some audio for transmission, why not record him on earth and transmit the file (doesn't need a special secure beam for this, just a high fidelity flac file encrypted with the Mars base's public key and sent over any high powered regular radio link from any tranmitter which survived post-surge on Earth) to Mars for them to resend over the special link? Why send him to the Moon before the flight to Mars, much more sensible to keep those "far side lunar" ships in a lunar orbit or at an Earth-Moon lagrange base. To quote Clarke I must remind you that the "travelling public gripes at the lack of direct Earth-to-Moon service", and for good reason. It is so much more sensible and efficient a way to travel, yet the film shows a direct Earth-Luna flight using a discarding stage multi-stage rocket with vertical lift-off, commerical flights to the moon seriously can't make sense without SSTO shuttles, huge LEO satellite bases and other such infrastructure, why does the film lack it? Why does the film show a lunar flight as if it just went straight upward, that has NO resemblance to the Earth escape hyperbola one would need for a quick and efficient route. Why does the main character not die of cancer from what would surely eed to be a nuclear motor he would have to crawl past (somewhere above the chemical launch stage and located so as to power the interplanetary ion engine, actually for title reasons a VASIMR rocket would go betetr there, recall the name of the company which is trying to develop them) when infiltrating the vehicle launched from Mars? Infact what kills the crewof the ship he infiltrates, I spotted a small silver cylinder getting breached but can't see how leaking an oxygen tank would suffocate others in the CABIN, unless it was a toxic gas, yet he takes his helmet off pretty swiftly to try to talk to the last man before he dies in which case a toxic gas would kill the main character too. When he reaches Neptune why does he need burn the engines of the transfer pod for several minutes to make the journey from his ship to his father's, yet simply jumping off a slowly rotating planar (what use is a planar nautical style system in 3D space?) scanning radar gives him the delta-V to get back? Why does he just discard the pod when jumping in to the father's station, he could spare a few minutes to affix it to something unconventional as an alternative to using the, damaged, docking port. The scienfitic implausibilities and mistakes thoughout cause the viewer to loose interest, and the poor ending just means you sat through all the previous scenes for no epic ending or plot-twist payoff.
Thanks