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

"what am i doing here?" - both me and brad pitt during ad astra

yeah he was great, it was the script that was on the nose

I did like one of his final lines about galaxies and nebula being beautiful "with nothing underneath"

also there's a pirate chase on the moon, this is a space movie

I haven't read the reshoot story I posted a couple weeks ago (spoilers). What scenes did they add?

The story didn’t give specifics abt scenes, just that supposedly there were reshoots done against Grays wishes

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is better than BR2049

Otm

I bet it was those stupid space wolves xp

If even that can't make it through the studio system without Disney demanding cuts and reshoots and voiceovers and extra ending scenes (and in one really dubious instance, removing a character's entire sexuality), what chance does anyone else have anymore?

— M.K. Rhodes (@mkrultra) September 21, 2019

I'd have lost at least a third of the voiceover... but it was ALL the studio's idea?

(I was confused by "Disney" until I remembered the Fox merger)

flappy, they wuz baboons

The scenes between pitt and the commander of the mars base give me a reshoot vibe, I wouldn't be surprised if those had been at tinkered with in some way. Her character seemed oddly truncated, and the way she moved the plot along seemed v perfunctory to me (I didnt totally buy that the government decided to tell the best-kept secret in the galaxy to her but not pitt, and she has the video evidence of it on her ipad ready to call up at a moments notice. unless I missed something, my memory's not clear on why exactly she had that video.)

gray said the space baboons were in his orig script iirc

yes, M K Rhodes' further tweets say that Negga's part was truncated.

obv the previous Pitt film this is most relevantly paired with is The Tree of Life

hadn't considered evaluating it along the Pitt axis. insightful!

Yeah

gray said the space baboons were in his orig script iirc

― johnny crunch, Monday, October 7, 2019 2:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

That is a wonderful sentence.

Thought this was pretty good--my first Gray film, will catch up with the others at some point. I thought I was clever to pick up on the Apocalypse Now affinities...but I guess every person who's ever reviewed or commented upon the film got there first. I missed that that was Liv Tyler until the credits. One unintentional laugh: when Pitt sneaks onto the spacecraft headed for Neptune, and when he fought the guy in a slow-motion space-grapple, the film seemed to follow the rule that if it's now an action film for a minute or two, somebody has to say "son of a bitch."

"Ad Astra" is one of my favourite Deerhunter songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuSgpL3J1bw

this movie was pretty to look at but i couldn't get past the hokey plotting and cliched character conflicts

this was terrible. so glad I didn't see this in a theater.

it did give a lot of heft to the action/effects episodes tbh. and not sure I would have gotten through some of the other bits in one sitting otherwise.

https://letterboxd.com/labuzamovies/film/ad-astra-2019/1/

The moon car chase was perfect for a 7am flight from Charlotte to Jacksonville.

but pointless? who was attacking them? who are we at war with? I could just ignore this if that scene wasn't so long and didn't seem like it was supposed to be important.

the narration was brutal on this, and the final scenes when he reaches dad underwhelming. was there even any revelation there?

wouldn't blowing up the ship powered by anti-matter result in an even bigger electrical surge?

movie needed more natasha lyonne

just smdh

who was attacking them? who are we at war with?

this was set up & explained pretty clearly iirc?

I don't think the details were spelled out. But there's resources, so there's raiders. That's kinda all there is to it.

I'd like to see Grey's edit before the tentpole stupid was added. I'm 100% certain that only that edit will save the film in future estimation.

#ReleasetheGrayCut

supposedly the stupid action scenes were all in the original; the later cut added the narration and removed footage from non-brad pitt characters.

lol, this was stunningly dumb and i almost quit but then SPACE MONKEYS and that was the one hat tip too many to suggest that everyone's fully aware they're on their bullshit. the "plot" hit really really close to home with my own daddy issues but come the fuck on with these metaphors. As a weird take on 40's/50's sci-fi, okay but why?

Obvs the visuals and effects (including Pitt in full on Keanu uncarved block mode and TL Jones as old man skeletor who never loved you) were outrageously good, mostly enough to keep me engaged when I wasn't shaking my head at the nonsense in general.

my opinion lies somewhere between latebloomers "impeccably crafted bourgie horseshit" and Fred's "i love that it just dives headfirst into banality." I'd likely need to watch it again to clarify but you've got to be kidding me, there is no way i'm watching this madness twice in a world so filled with other things to do.

I genuinely started laughing at the mars recording studio... with red rock baffles!
http://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/10418278a.jpg

i do wish i'd seen it in theaters if i was gonna see it.... that made gravity a fun watch and it likely woulda helped this. I woulda likely nodded off at the end regardless.

killer soundtrack tho! will listen again.

the space baboons were lab animals from Earth, no one else is saying anything different, right

"a world so filled with other things to do" is a strange concept in an era when ppl are watching last summer's Tarantella movie 5+ times

Those were space monkeys; I am willing to stake my reputation on it.

It’s very rare that I do an immediate rewatch of any film; I could see trying this again if it were in theaters in maybe, oh, five years.

last year's Tarantino movie is 10x better than this was, jesus.

akm otm

i'll assume youre wrong

I'll take a self-indulgent/butchered by the studios mess by a good director over anything fucking Tootsie Tarantino does 4eva!

Kinda got overlooked I like this movie quite a bit for what it was, Hollywood outer space pop psych... Sound design was fantastic.

Finally got around to this - a bit ponderous but ultimately solid. Of the nu-ratpack space movies was definitely the best or, at least, the one with the most ideas and best visual + sound design.

yeah i liked this a lot more than i expected to

seemed to draw from various New Wave sf deconstructions of the space program - Moorcock's Black Corridor, various Malzberg books (Beyond Apollo, etc.), but I think Morbz is also correct about the debt to Westerns

just saw this, it was phenomenally stupid. I liked the way it paid the smallest attention to some aspects of physics but completely fucked up almost everything else. Praise for being one of the rare vacuum-is-silent brigade, though.
Voiceover was terrible and ponderous. Pitt's line deliveries also often unintentionally funny.
Also like the way when they meet the space baboon they don't even bother looking for the people presumably also on the space station (unless baboon sent the SOS itself because it was bored).
What the fuck did Tommy Lee Jones eat all those years? His station was tiny.

yes, worst movie I saw last year by some distance.

nice to read wrongness

It looked nice and I think there’s a seed of a good movie there, but yeah, it is not great. B-rate Malick voiceovers maybe a big part of what dropped it.

Gray >> Malick this decade