Ad Astra - Settle an argument for me.

[hobbes]

Just saw Ad Astra at the cinema with P.

P thought it was a turgid pile of shit, while I argued it was a pretentious AND turgid pile of shit.

Who is right?

Seriously, what a load of sub-Malik nonsense. Absolutely the sort of turd our Terrance would crimp out on a Wednesday afternoon while snorting 50 lines of finest ego talc.
It looks beautiful, like one of those IMAX movies they do to show off the technology, or like any idiot can manage these days with insta-filters on their iphone bobbins or whatever the kids have now.
The script was more stilted than a riverside village in Myanmar, and the story amounted to "don't bottle up your feelings, right kids?"
I'm not hard to please when it comes to Sci fi. Shit, I watched Interstellar... twice! And quite enjoyed the ending. I didn't even mind Prometheus. (I mean, I drew the line at Avatar, obviously. I'm not a complete idiot.) But this was so bad I might have to stick to rom coms and action thrillers for a bit until I get the taste out of my mouth.

I give it zero stars.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Pizza Express do a Pollo Ad Astra which is quite nice.

Does that help?

[hobbes]

Chicken to the stars!
Couldn't be any worse, I suppose.

[Hot Pepsi]

Hobbesian wrongness. I thought it was fantastic.

[jason voorhees]

This is certainly shaping up as a works/don't work, feel it/don't feel it style of movie.

[Hot Pepsi]

It is 100% that

[Felicity, I guess so]

It wasn’t fantastic but there were some really powerful elements near-ruined by a rushed, seemingly tacked-on ending (not uncommon even in great sci-fi such as “Moon” as well as the execrable “Into Stella”).

[gt3]

If you think of it as Heart of Darkness in space it might make more sense. It could have done with being about half an hour shorter. But I really enjoyed it. Pretentious? Yes. Turgid? No. So, you and P are both wrong and I'm correct.

[Sits]

Has anyone made a movie of HoD in its original era/location? Just out of interest.

Edit: if I’d bothered looking at IMDB I’d have found the 1993 version with Tim Roth and John Malkovich. A princely 5.8.

[San Bernardhinault]

Beautiful to look at. Full of plot holes and sillinness . Totally random elements thrown in that, while entertaining on their own, aren't driven by or relevent to the plot and thus get annoying as huge coincidences. 40 minutes staring at Brad Pitt's face but without the reason you do that with Ryan Gosling in First Man. A whole load of tiresome existential bollocks. A voiceover that mostly states the obvious. An utterly pointless coda at the end that just adds time to the film with no content. A whole bunch of interesting ideas and people which keep getting dropped and not returned to.

I think there's enough to this that it could have been a good film. But instead it's just a massive mess that thinks it's way more important than it is.

In comparison with other dodgy SF: Interstellar was a much more entertaining massive mess full of self-importance. Passengers (the first half of it) was better as a film about being alone in space.

[Hot Pepsi]

No it wasn’t.

[tracteurgarcon]

The graphics look a bit dated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=898Ds6EQbLU

[Ray de Galles]

So I thought this was OK, visually stunning (though the sound mix was poor, at least in the cinema I was in, meaning a lot of the dialogue was hard to catch) and I enjoyed Pitt's performance - I didn't even mind the voiceover apart from the few occasions it was far too on the nose.

A couple of plot holes/queries though (SPOILERS) ;


- if the power surges were coming from damage to the anti-matter drive of the Lima during the mutiny, didn't that happen 13 years ago? Why have they only just hit Earth, the Moon and Mars? Do they take 13 years to travel that far? If so, aren't there 13 years more of them to suffer? If so, I suppose one could imagine the shock wave from blowing up Lima might neutralise them in some way but it's a bit pat.

- if Lima took 16 years to reach Neptune, how come Roy McBride's craft Cepheus got there from Mars in 76 days (with the journey from Earth to Mars via the Moon taking not much additional time, it would appear)? I can't imagine deep space travel technology has developed that much in the 13 years Lima has been missing, especially given they banned long distance missions following it's disappearance.

- a more minor one is that Spacecom entrusting the task of destroying the Lima to the journeymen astronauts of the remaining original crew of the Cepheus (especially as they're a man down and effectively leaderless having lost their captain) seem very peculiar given the importance of the task and the trouble they took getting Roy McBriide to Mars in the first place,

I'm overthinking it, aren't I?

[RobW]

Turgid and pretentious, desperately wanting to be Apocalypse Now in Space. Dull, constant close ups of Brad Pitt and god, that fucking narration.