James Gray's "inward-looking" sci-fi film AD ASTRA starring Brad Pitt

Ah, I wish I had loved it! I'm generally a fan of this kind of film and could have done with a couple of hours proper escape.

How do you mean you loved the dive into banality?

reported reshoots by another director

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2019/9/ad-astra-had-reshoots-without-james-grays-approval

yikes

i would imagine Gray would not mesh perfectly with big-budget expectations

I liked this a lot and look forward to seeing it again, but a lot like Z it felt relatively muted to me on first watch. Just like Z I found myself wanting it to go just a bit further *out there* (funny thing to think during a movie that ends literally at Neptune). The music was good but nothing quite as effective as the Ravel in Z.

Perhaps unfair to compare them since I feel so strongly about the prior film, but I think I actually enjoyed this more than Z after the first watch. I will see this again with my aging father (lol) who is a sci fi nut and hopefully untangle my feelings a bit more.

It’s always upsetting to me when movies like this—ambitiously flawed thoughtful and personal, lyrical, adult—are handled poorly and then bomb—which this will. Every great movie is a miracle but it feels like we could have movies like this pretty regularly.

Also: no idea why 2001 is being metioned with this...the real comparison is Soderbergh’s Solaris.

I enjoyed this, wasn't totally blown away by it. It's too facile to say "Terence Malick's Apocalypse Now," but I can't shake the phrase. The moon chase and space critters were weird side roads to take, and Natasha Lyonne's cameo was a lol.

There was a shitload of Movie Science in this picture.

it sounds interesting, hearing about it makes me think of High Life, but I guess this has more action

Just saw. Really enjoyed this, need to think about it. Kinda wanna see it again.

It's interesting to reflect on the fact that the reserved emotional nature of these last two films is both text and subtext...both are about men with an inability to have intimacy, inhabiting movies that keep us at arm's length (Ad Astra *talks about* feelings, but only in the negative)...but what's particularly intriguing to me is that they see masculinity itself as a kind of woundedness, or a way to cope with being wounded, a survival strategy or search for security that's enormously empathetic and not really interested in scoring cheap shots against "toxic masculinity" so much as it is concerned about charting a way through masculinity towards something...more yielding.

The story of how Natasha Lyonne ended up in this movie is so very... Natasha Lyonne: https://slate.com/culture/2019/09/natasha-lyonne-ad-astra-cameo-explained-james-gray.html

I love her.

This was impeccably crafted but I get very annoyed when science fiction that is touted as “adult” or “thoughtful” ends up just being more warmed-over Oedipal dreariness.

Space travel: it’s just an elaborate form of therapy where you learn how to process your feelings about dad

“Just open up a little, dude. Enjoy some coffee, talk to your wife.” Ok, great. Why did we have to go to fucking space to learn this?

What a bunch of bourgeois horse manure. Urgh.

Very pretty movie though

I think this would have been more interesting if was from the perspective of TLJ’s character. If we’re gonna dive into the emptiness of the cosmos and the need for humans to appreciate our precious, fleeting existence and learn to live with one another (or whatever this movie thinks it’s saying), then make the story about a character who would actually care about this one way or another. Brad Pitt’s character doesn’t care about anything except doing his mission and reconnecting with daddy. (Yeah, he learns to lighten up a bit at the end, but so what).

We should be able to feel the horror of someone finding out that this search has been pointless. That’s the real story here, but the movie is too chickenshit to deal with it directly.

I just feel like every James Gray film until now has been from Tommy Lee Jones' characters point of view, so I appreciated he tried something new this time.

We should be able to feel the horror of someone finding out that this search has been pointless. That’s the real story here, but the movie is too chickenshit to deal with it directly.

that actually is the story of Pitt's character! His entire encounter with his father is disappointing and pointless for him.

think this would have been more interesting if was from the perspective of TLJ’s character. If we’re gonna dive into the emptiness of the cosmos and the need for humans to appreciate our precious, fleeting existence and learn to live with one another (or whatever this movie thinks it’s saying), then make the story about a character who would actually care about this one way or another.

You missed the point of the movie

No, I understood what the movie itself was doing. It’s not exactly rocket science*

It’s just that I found Pitt’s character’s journey less interesting than the implied backstory of his father. In other words I freely admit I just wish it was a different kind of movie entirely.

I’ll give Ad Asta this though: it made me care enough to be mad at it. These days that’s gotta count for something.

*i make no apologies for this :D

but I disagree with your point about Pitt learning to live with stranded Liv Tyler. If anything, Gray's editing and framing decisions are more devastating: he returns to her because "eh fuck it."

I'm not crazy about the film because Sad Space movies are so not my genre.

I also want to praise the effects work in this. Other than the baboon (which looked fine but was obviously CGI) the visuals were nearly seamless.

From what I've read, I'd watch the James Grey version.

I loved this and found it very exciting. The fall from the space antenna opening is soooo good. It was weird though that Ruth Negga is all dressed up like some Pheobe Philo era Céline model on Mars.

The Lost Space Station Z

As someone who love love loved Gravity and The Martian, I found this underwhelming.

Pacing-wise it felt disjointed, like they'd wanted to go the noble route of creating a scientifically-sound, brooding take on the modern space opera genre but later got told to liven it up with some pointless action sequences which got punched-in at 20-30 minute intervals.

Everything to do with Sutherland and the space pirates felt very pointless. The space baboons sequence was from some other movie. Both those sequences were far-fetched and thrillery.

The film spent a long time taking me down detours and dead-ends, all the while alluding to some great reveal that never really happened. The entire denouement and final sequence was anticlimactic, predictable and ultimately no different to what we've seen on other recent 'lost in space' flicks.

A big part of the problem for me was not being able to connect with Pitt's character, nor bringing myself to care all that much about his relationship with his father, which seemed to be the emotional crux the film was trying to ply on me.

Meanwhile the rather major plotpoint of the power surges was reduced to a MacGuffin, brought up in only the most offhand way by TLJ's character at the end. How the hell was a relatively small spacecraft generating enough power to cause such catastrophic damage on Earth? And why was this happening? And (forgive me, maybe I had a lapse) was this something TLJ was doing on purpose? He seemed to be trying to stop it, but who knows, the film seemed more interested in getting me to care about Liv Tyler's 10 seconds of screentime than the actual science or motive of the mission.

On the other hand, everyone should stop discussing this film and go see Aniara, another space epic with lots of 'A's in the title, and which really did give me that true sense of space vertigo-madness this was hinting at.

I admired the Transformers/G.I. Joe-level science insisting that an explosion would "power" the journey back to Earth.

There's a plotline in Cixin Liu's (very 'hard' sci-fi) Death's End that proposes you could power a very small craft big enough to hold a housecat (or in the book, a human brain) by daisy chaining a series of nuclear bombs along its path and setting them off behind it at regular intervals. So this is a gross simplification of the same method, although clearly it would never work.

I realise this is Hollywood, but when the makers said they set-out to do a proper science-based space film and you end up with this kind of transparently Deus Ex ending, it stops being sci-fi and starts operating purely on a metaphorical level, the whole 'lost-in-space' device becoming a clothes horse to drape a lightweight sheet of human-interest onto it. But when the main character is a stoic mumbler, the lost father and the work-widowed wife barely present in the story, it's very hard to make the emotional investment the film so dearly beggars.

I didn't mind the stoic mumbling because middle aged Brad Pitt is a pretty stoic mumbler.

Natasha Lyonne was weird... Like, 'hey let's have a full minute where Russian Doll lady does some dull admin work and asks people to sign stuff while dressed in a red boiler suit'

The unintended downside of having a recognizable actor play a bit role is the projection of prior work on to the present character.

also that she was doing nothing especially entertaining or plot-driven save for getting people to sign-in

Regarding Alfred's questioning of the explosion: a rocket is really a controlled, directly explosion while a bomb is an uncontrolled, undirected one. As long as you're lined up perpendicular to it, and your craft not overly damaged, a bomb is an effective source of thrust. Obviously it's not very efficient, but in the case of a nuclear explosion, you're talking about quite a bit of undirected thrust.

So it's "powered" not in the way you're charging the craft's store of energy, but in the way that a large explosive hand is shoving you off toward the beyond.

Had the film been shot after Lyonne's profile increased due to the Netflix show the role might have been cast differently. As far as I can gather, Ad Astra was shot about six months before Russian Doll

for me, it's 'why have it in at all?'. her character ads so little and yet the camera spends a long time shouting 'LOOK, LOOK WHO IT IS!'. A lot could have been cut from this film and it would have been a generally better sustained and more impactful experience.

I don't know if it would work, but I'd be interested in what this film would be like with drastically reduced (or even completely without) voiceover exposition.

The character I related to the most when it comes to the idea of being trapped in space was the baboon tbh

I feel like the facial hair signifying time elapsed is all wrong in this movie.

there was a lot of facial hair close-ups in this

This was impeccably crafted but I get very annoyed when science fiction that is touted as “adult” or “thoughtful” ends up just being more warmed-over Oedipal dreariness.

― Conceptualize Wyverns (latebloomer), Saturday, September 21, 2019 10:38 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Amen. Moon chase was rad, though. Then I snoozed in and out.

god, this movie was a beautiful incoherent mess.

I did appreciate it though for confirming that I will never be as terrified by any horror movie as much as I am by films about all the things that can go wrong in space. The opening sequence + moon chase + baboon attack = A++. But the rest of it... yikes.

And I too wondered whether I would've liked it more without Brad Pitt's mumbly voiceover. So many beautiful images utterly ruined by his constant droning.

Also, poor Liv Tyler, constantly being left behind on Earth by emotionally-stunted astronauts. Can I get a Liv Tyler in space movie next?

Space is too damn big

Even if you could send a video message from Earth direct to Uranus when they're closest, it'd take over two hours to arrive.

Gray goes over his mistakes. He's such a good subject.

Spoilers (?) for Ad Astra but we watched it lol pic.twitter.com/v7ispODXZ6

— Kate Beaton (@beatonna) September 23, 2019

My bad on the above Uranus calculation -- for some reason, even watching the film, I kept thinking TLJ's character was stuck there and not Neptune. There's probably something insidiously Freudian going on with my memory.

Gray goes over his mistakes. He's such a good subject.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, September 25, 2019 4:26 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

That’s a great interview! I think this really hammers home why I have such a problem with what the movie is trying to do:

I think the tragedy of Tommy Lee’s character is that he never found a pleasure in the beauties that he discovered. He never found beauty in the idea that human beings are what matter. The idea of striving is what matters.

But what is there to strive for? New balls of rocks to build houses on? What we see of humanity in this movie isn’t exactly inspiring. Humans have colonized space, but we only see a continuation of the same social structures and conflicts that currently plague us.

Can you blame someone for seeking transcendence in the possibility of contact with some other form of intelligence?

Who wouldn’t go mad after dedicating their life to that search and discovering it was all for naught? And picture just how horrifying being stuck in space with a person undergoing that process of disillusionment would be.

To me, *that’s* the story. The movie borrows so much from Apocalypse Now but ignores Kurtz’s final words:

“The horror...the horror”

The character I related to the most when it comes to the idea of being trapped in space was the baboon tbh

― mh, Monday, September 23, 2019 3:10 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM. The most rational being in the entire film

latebloomer did you see 'high life'?

cynical me is getting much better at watching stuff uncynically and I really liked this as a result

Beautiful but ponderous. The narration is at least as bad as the much-loathed Blade Runner voiceover.

It's not that this film was so monumentally dumb (and as a sci-fi it is staggeringly, relentlessly stupid), it's that it was ever touted as anything else. Looks great, though, and I'll watch any daft shit if it's set in space. I think it might become a camp classic.

I want a panel show with Morbs and Alfred now

― babu frik fan account (mh), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 10:20 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

pay us!

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius),

I wish I had!

I remember literally nothing about this aside from the rover chase.

how did no one make the horrible Dad Astra pun

p sure i made it irl

The rover chase was cool but had me questioniong the viability of moon piracy as a business model. Also Donald Sutherland was there but also not there which was odd.

finally watched it, there are some great sequences but also several wtf moments some of which have been mentioned already:

- so he accidentally kills the crew that in theory could've done what he's done? "sorry guys but i really need to see my dad"

- the message had to be recorded in an anechoic chamber because why? ("well, neptune is very very far, we really want the sound quality to be the best, you know")

- natasha lyonne looked so out of place that i'm hoping she's intentionally planting herself in different movies and it will somehow come together in russian doll season 3

i don't remember one second of this film I was so looking forward to and found so disappointing