This is not the movie that you’re looking for.
Who cares if it has Tommy Lee Jones and Brad Pitt. Look away now.
I’ll make this easy on you. The biggest achievement in the whole movie, the thing that Director James Gray won’t stop talking about, the leading cause of disconnect for me, was his accurate representation of space travel. In creating the accurate depiction, he also made it too real to focus. We’re traveling in space with today’s technology… “Does not compute”.
And it turned out to be the only thing that I liked about the whole movie.
First off, why did they take the detour with the monkeys? How does that play any part in the story? You spend all this time setting up how Roy’s heart rate never exceeds 80bps, not even when he falls off the satellite in the first five minutes of the movie, but a monkey attacking on a spaceship does him in. The moment, in actuality, takes away from the way that his heart does speed up when he does anything related to his dad.
Here’s the one time when being too literal and accurate with your plot doesn’t work. Everything they said would happen did. There was no twist at the end. Nothing to pay off the suspense being built. Maybe that’s its biggest downfall. The content and delivery built up this thriller suspense when the movie was just about a man having to see his dad after being abandoned at sixteen. And because having a story like this played out on Earth is too vanilla, let’s put it in space.
Seriously, if they had put the ending in Rory’s head, that in fact the encounter with his dad was fake, that would have been amazing. They had me thinking it was in his head for a minute too because everything was perfect. It’s all the things that an abandoned kid wants to hear. We want our parents to admit that they never loved us.
Don’t even get me started on the horrible acting either. Brad Pitt, what has happened to you? Where did you go? Or was this always your limit? Carefully disguised in movies without any emotional stretch.
Speaking of emotional stretches, there was not a single emotional payoff. Birds of Prey, here we come again. The pivotal moments were flatter than a pancake. If I’m stuck analyzing the moments to understand the payoff, than you’re not doing it right.
And finally, the last thing I’ll gripe about, the exposition. Why oh why did we need the voice overs? What took five minutes in a monotone, unemotional way, could have been achieved in one line. Showing vs. telling my friends. One of the most basic concepts in story telling. My goodness, and they weren’t even consistent with it, delivery information that had no importance to the story.
It’s okay. I needed to see Ad Astra. I change my mind. You should watch it just for the confidence boost. Seriously, watching this with a star cast makes me think that I can get my movie produced some day.
Happy Watching
Love Kait