After being a little stir-crazy I took a look at what was out and realized how movies so often have a first showing on Thursday nights, so I decided to check out Ad Astra after all of the hype that it would be Apocalypse Now meets Gravity.  I was one of only about three or four total in the theater and I don’t know if that had to do with how few people go to movies during the work-week or this movie not getting the sort of positive buzz I thought it had.

Ad Astra is the sort of movie filmmakers create when they want to take a high concept and symbolize it through the story.  In this case, the idea of parental estrangement is exaggerated by the father being literally billions of miles away.  And the subplot is that by being raised in a stoic manner, Pitt’s character is cursed by being a stoic unfeeling Spock type.

Given that this is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing much has been written about the stoicism of the original crop of astronauts.  These guys came from the military.  They were most often test-pilots.  They had to keep their cool in extraordinary circumstances.  And early on the film demonstrates how Pitt’s character keeps his cool in a near-death experience.  The effects in this sequence and the movie in general are outstanding, but the problem is we now take all this for granted.  So that aspect of critiquing the movie is off the table.  It’s good, but then we have to focus on the rest.

They say the #1 sin in movie/tv is being boring.  And by focusing the story around a character with few emotions and then having him interact with very few other characters is a lack of drama.  What you get instead is an extended voiceover narration ala Apocalypse Now.  I am NOT a fan of voiceover.  I think this is almost always a crutch, telling rather than showing.  And too often that’s exactly what he does.

Part of the reason for him being stoic is the expectations of the institution.  He is given psychological evaluations similar to the Voight-Kampff tests in Blade Runner, only instead of trying to discern humanity, it’s trying to stifle it, on the basis that it’s too dangerous to space travel.  There are a couple points in the movie where freaking out or being impulsive proves deadly, seemingly to validate the idea that being stoic is indeed the best approach.  And yet ultimately the movie wants to follow more of a Hollywood motif of saying he needs to lighten up and settle down with a pretty girl (in this case, the woefully underutilized Liv Tyler).

The world we’re introduced do is mildly dystopian in the sense that despite having started to colonize the Moon and Mars, there is constant low-level warfare going on.  The motivations behind this conflict are never explained.  It’s just there, similar to the squabbles in the backstory of the new Lost in Space.  It would have probably enriched the story to have less tunnel-vision and a wider vantage point of the current geopolitics.

Anyway, the premise behind the story is similar to Apocalypse Now.  You have an old soldier who has somehow gone crazy in some mysterious way that is causing problems back at home, and the younger man needs to go out and investigate and/or neutralize the troublemaker.  This is just made that much harder by virtue of the father/son relationship, although in Apocalypse now a sort of adopted father/son theme introduces itself (and then subverted in sort of an Oedipus-complex way).

What hooked me in was the extraterrestrial angle, that maybe the reason Tommy Lee Jones’ character went crazy was that he actually made contact with aliens.  The antimatter bursts that were causing problems on earth suggested something of that nature was afoot.  And so it set up a lot of expectation as we endured the long stretches of runtime where Pitt was brooding or moving from heavenly body to heavenly body.

(Spoilers below the screenshot)

The problem is that it’s revealed that Tommy Lee Jones found nothing.  There was some sort of anti-matter reactor that was malfunctioning and he was still looking for ETs, but that’s it.  Talk about anti-climax!

I was then thinking, at least Pitt can warm his father’s heart and take him back to Earth.  But the film won’t have that either.  Jones’ character has to remain sort of like Luke in The Last Jedi, cold, detached, waiting for death.  So even when Pitt tries to drag his dad back to his ship, his dead is kicking and screaming until he forces himself to detach.  It’s one thing for Pitt’s personality to be explained via his dad, but we’re never given any reason why his dad is so unfeeling.  The father figure is used purely as a symbol or plot device.  But it means that Pitt spends all of his time trying to reconnect with his dad only for it to have proven to be a waste of time, that what he really needed was to give up on the idea of reconnecting at all.  That’s not a very uplifting message.  For Pitt to put in that much energy, it should have had an impact on his dad.  The film doesn’t want to allow for that.  The only character Pitt is allowed to connect with is his cypher of a love-interest.

I may be reading too much into it, but if the message of the film is that men should be more open with their feelings, then it should allow for two men to share feelings (at the very least father and son) rather than just men opening up romantically to women.  For instance, the redemption arc of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi is a great movie-moment.  But even when Pitt eventually gets back to earth, we’re given little more than a hint that he will rekindle his romance with Liv Tyler.  The transformation is not really shown.  Instead Pitt continues to talk to the audience like he’s in a therapy session.  This makes the movie feel more like a book than a movie.

I think filmmakers fancy themselves as amateur psychologists but sometimes this can get the better of them.  The main role of a narrative filmmaker is to entertain.  Teaching or educating is purely secondary.

There was one moment in the film where I thought it would zig instead of zag which I felt was a huge missed opportunity.  Remember where I said I thought there would be aliens?  Well during the whole tussle with his dad, when they get detached, you see him floating and there is a glimmering light in the background.  I really thought at that moment it would turn out to be an alien ship finally deciding to intervene in some way.  And as hokey as that would have been, it would have made the long slog worthwhile.  Pitt’s dad sacrificed so much to try to connect with aliens, and that could finally have been justified.

Instead, we are giving some dialogue about how we have nobody but ourselves.

And sure, that kind of works, but the payoff is so muted, so anti-climactic, that I just felt cheated for having invested so much of my time for so little gained.

The theme of social isolation appeals to my no doubt, and it has been explored in sci-fi before, like in Duncan Jones’ Moon.  I just feel like there had to have been a better way to tell this story without it being so dull and low-energy.

What’s also confusing to me is the contradictory messaging of Pitt’s OTHER film this year, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  That movie is more of a celebration of masculinity and male-bonding.  Whereas this movie seems to be portraying masculinity as inhuman.  So while Pitt is busy promoting this movie he seems to be undercutting the theme of Quentin’s movie.  The truth, of course, lies in the middle.  When Pitt’s character walks into the hornet’s nest of the Manson gang in Once Upon a Time and manages to kick ass in return for the slashing of his tires and walk off unscathed, and later on prevent the Manson murders (while under the influence of drugs no less) it validates the idea of keeping your cool.  Most men are NOT as cold and unfeeling as presented in Ad Astra.  They just know when to show it and when not to show it.  So I think this film slightly caricatures the downside of masculinity in the same way a movie like Legally Blonde or Fatal Attraction does with female nature.  It’s just that in 2019 it seems like society is putting masculinity on trial, which is why movies like Ad Astra get greenlit in the first place and celebrations of macho like Rambo: Last Blood receive blowback.  While I’ve never been a Rambo fanboi, I think I’ll wind up watching it as there are so few examples of movies from more of a male point of view, rather than just men being judged for their perceived sins.

So while overall the film is well-crafted for what it is, I just can’t recommend it because of its slow pacing, low-energy, and “meh” payoff.

–othreviewer