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 Ad Astra comes out today! I don't know anything about it other than 1) it's supposed to be hard sci fi, 2) it's supposed to be pretty good, and 3) Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Liv Tyler, and Donald Sutherland are in it. I've purposely been avoiding any information on it, but from what I understand it also has a mystery element, with Brad Pitt's character going on a mission to locate his missing father *somewhere* in the Solar System. I was hoping to see it a few months ago when it was originally projected to be released, but I guess it got pushed back (always a bad sign from my experience). I was then hoping to see it tomorrow, but I'm not sure if that will work out now. Either way, I hope to see it soon!
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Sep 20, 2019 10:22
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I’ve got a ticket for an IMAX screening this afternoon. Looks very promising.
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Sep 20, 2019 11:42
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I saw it last night. Overall, I liked it. Most of the space stuff is well done. The technology feels grounded, like something your great grandkids might experience. This is a pretty traditional sci-fi movie where you’re left to ponder the moral of the story. My takeaways... Even if humans devote themselves to nobler pursuits like space travel and the search for intelligent life, we’re still deeply flawed. We’re shown a near future moon base that looks more like a mall than a research facility, complete with an Applebee’s. The moon is divided up between countries and private companies who mine its resources and fight over territory. There is a great scene where pirates attack on lunar rovers as Brad Pitt is being escorted across the moon to the rocket that takes him to Mars. It all felt appropriate. I kept thinking, yep, if we make it this far we’ll just find new ways to commercialize and fight over everything. There is a scene I originally thought was out of place where they respond to a mayday from another spacecraft. We find that the craft was a research mission where humans experiment on animals. I thought that was an appropriate comment on our relationship with nature at large. All those advancements and we still haven’t found harmony with nature. The movie has a lot to say about the search for ET. No matter how much we search, the chances we ever find other intelligent life in the universe are pretty bleak due to circumstances beyond our control. Humans built a space needle, moon base, mars base and even sent a manned mission to the orbit of Neptune without finding any signs of intelligent life. Regarding the character drama, it’s a lot of the same commentary, but on a more personal level... Tommy Lee Jones dedicated his life to the search and came up empty handed and damaged things around him. He never found ET and he lost his wife and his son because of his obsession. Brad Pitt was on a similar trajectory. He dedicates his life to his career as an astronaut. He compartmentalizes his anger towards his father because that’s how he learned to do a good job as an astronaut. Push the feelings aside and carry on. He loses his wife as a result and seems doomed to repeat all the mistakes of his father. On the macro and micro level the message is the same. Humans have a tendency to look beyond what’s right in front of them in search for something else. We should value other humans because that might be all we ever have. This applies to larger pursuits like the search for intelligent life, but also to our relationships with others. Anyways, those are my initial observations hastily typed on my phone as soon as I woke up. I do recommend the movie. There were several, “Well that’s convenient” plot elements. But if you can look past those I think it’s worth your time. There is one particular scene that really stuck with me where Pitt’s character is at his lowest point, his father again having abandoned him, billions of miles from earth, his pod back to the main ship damaged. We get a great first person view into the blackness of space, broken up only by distant specks of light. Pitt’s narration in this scene as he contemplates just giving up left me heartbroken. But the end of the movie gives a nice glimmer of hope. People can change. You aren’t doomed to repeat your parent’s mistakes.
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Sep 20, 2019 12:15
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I thought this movie was a drab and sits firmly behind Interstellar, The Martian, Gravity and Moon.
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Sep 20, 2019 12:35
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Generally hated it - what a waste of stunning visuals and effects. I'm just incredibly bored with middle-aged men's repression, internalised anger, and daddy issues. It felt like everything here was in service to the metaphor and Brad Pitt's inner dialog, and so much of the dialogue was cliched as hell. Everyone not Brad Pitt was barely there. The whole sequence with the Cepheus's crew, the interminable underwater swim, etc - yes yes you were very high concept doing a womb and umbilical metaphor to go with your breastfeeding metaphor on the trip to Neptune but it's why are your tears running down your face in zero gravity why is the Cepheus crew the same crowd for the top secret mission with no replacement they blew up the antimatter with a nuuuukee did Brad Pitt have a contract saying that he'd be able to do the whole movie with the same beard like Harrison Ford and his favorite t-shirt in Blade Runner 2049? The wide shots for the Moon and Mars were beautiful and I enjoyed the generally grungy space aesthetic and the set detail. The opening action sequence kicked the hell out of the rest of the movie too.
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Sep 20, 2019 13:11
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Escalators on a moon base.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:26
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Why don't they have armored moon buggies?
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Sep 20, 2019 14:50
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xiw posted:Generally hated it - what a waste of stunning visuals and effects. Are we going to ignore the slingshot maneuver with a solar panel shield at the end? I mean get the gently caress out of here. Why does every hard sci-fi movie have to be a psychological dreck or devolve into a monster movie? There is like a bunch of novels for Hollywood to siphon from. Well at least we have The Expanse. gohmak fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 16:46
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SCheeseman posted:Escalators on a moon base. And 1g indoors,1/8g outside.
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Sep 20, 2019 16:52
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God this movie loving sucks
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Sep 20, 2019 17:04
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Not knowing much about it going in, I called that it was going to be Apocalypse Now in Space as soon as Brad Pitt meets with those military officers at the beginning.
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Sep 20, 2019 18:34
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gohmak posted:Are we going to ignore the slingshot maneuver with a solar panel shield at the end? I mean get the gently caress out of here. Yeah by that point I was kind of done with tallying up unrealistic space flight but it was pretty funny how obvious that spinning radar was - it was in the centre of the shot for ages, the characters practically stared at it for minutes on end, and it was the only bit of the lima the camera was interested in. We never got a close shot of the surge generator / broken antimatter device - the movie didn't give a poo poo about that. Everything related to flying back and forth through the ring was hilariously bad. Don't forget the bit straight after where brad makes it back through the deadly rings, and is somehow stopped in space relative to the Cepheus. He fires his jetpack and accelerates full speed towards the ship and ... slams into it! and there's dramatic music like he's going to fall off! but he catches it at the last minute! I burst out laughing because we're supposed to think Brad's competent but he's forgotten about things like 'slowing down'. It was like watching someone throw themselves down a staircase and then we're supposed to care about them dramatically stopping on the last landing.
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Sep 20, 2019 20:32
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This forum: "Cinemasins sux!" Also this forum: *cinemasins the poo poo out of space movie*
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Sep 20, 2019 21:43
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The movie was touted as hard sci-fi and has the self-seriousness of it too, it's not really cinemasins-level nitpicking to point out gaping holes in the movies internal logic. Moon buggies are designed the way they are because they need to be lightweight as every gram counts when transporting goods by rocket, which clearly isn't a problem anymore if they can build stainless steel escalators on the Moon, making the transportation of important people using unarmored vehicles across a warzone very stupid. Dumb science isn't the only problem with the film anyway, the main story thread is pretty hackneyed daddy issues stuff and Brad, ostensibly the hero (and framed as such in the narrative) makes so many stupid, selfish decisions that he's kind of irredeemable. He's 100% responsible for the deaths of that crew, who likely would have completed the mission despite the co-pilot being pretty useless, it's not that hard to arm a nuke and throw it from an airlock.
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Sep 20, 2019 22:12
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I felt they were really going for a blade runner 2049 vibe but just ended up hollow.
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Sep 20, 2019 22:23
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Yeah pretty much - the SF issues are just chrome, the core problems i had with the movie were all about the characters. it's yet another hard military man making hard choices over a trail of corpses and being rewarded for it. The whole second half of the movie feels like it's running on solipsistic dream logic - I was fully braced for a 'Brad is still on Mars in a relaxation room' ending but nope we're expected to take seriously Liv Tyler walking back in the door, despite nothing whatsoever having changed. Her only dialogue in the movie is clearly explaining why Brad is not even there in the relationship - and at the end Brad's still talking away to himself that connection is important, instead of actually talking to another human. Rename thread to Dad Astra please.
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Sep 20, 2019 22:26
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This film really wants to be something special but honestly watching Brad Pitt have an existential crisis en route to deal with his daddy issues was really just not a particularly good watch. I enjoyed it for being pretty hard sci-fi, it felt plausible to a point (there were some jarring things technically speaking but nothing that ruined it for me), but as far as entertaining films go, this is really not for general audiences. I saw 2 groups of people walk out and half my friends hated everything about it. The rest of us who didn't hate it couldn't really deny any of their complaints as they all felt fair. Just re-watch The Martian instead, you will have way more fun.
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Sep 20, 2019 23:26
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Ad Astra is quite beautiful, ambitious, and the most hilariously pretentious non-French film I’ve ever seen. And I’m not a person who automatically dislikes weighty movies with unusual pacing and themes; “2001” is one of my all-time faves. Ad Astra is what 2001 would have been if the story had been written by Dr. Phil rather than Arthur C Clarke. You know you’ve wasted your money when, towards the end of the movie, you start wishing that Crow and Tom Servo had been sitting in the row in front of you.
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Sep 21, 2019 00:21
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It does look nice, but that's makes it kind of worse since it seems like wasted effort that could have been better spent on a script that wasn't garbage.
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Sep 21, 2019 01:57
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I didn’t read the spoilers, but so far I’m not feeling confident based on what I’m seeing
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Sep 21, 2019 02:22
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I really wish I'd loved the second half of this as much as I did the first. Brad Pitt working his way through near-future space travel was great. Once he murders a few astronauts because him meeting his daddy is more important than stopping the extinction of life in the solar system I lost a lot of sympathy for the character. Didn't help that around that time the world-building aspect disappeared.
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Sep 21, 2019 02:25
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Well I liked it. I liked how everyone was obsessed with keeping up appearances. Everyone in the movie is doing this tightly choreographed dance to hide their turmoil. At the same time, characters can see through each other and everyone knows the facades are bullshit, but nobody seriously tries to rescue each other from the status quo: - Brad Pitt notices scared astronaut but just keeps covering for him - As soon as they leave Moon Applebees the Moon Technicals show up but once they reach the other side it's like "Yeah you can pick up the bodies over there, scramble the body recovery teams" - SpaceCom is relentlessly corporate fake, the woman saying "We'll provide more details when they become available" made my skin crawl because it was too loving real - Also the entire movie is punctuated by Brad passing a test to prove he can act normal, only after he fails does he start challenging SpaceCom I liked the theme of abandonment. Little thing I noticed is basically every corpse gets dumped into space. I was like, don't their families want the body? Then I realized if the corpse was returned, it would be like "coming home." Instead, from the perspective of the bereaved, their loved ones left one day and never came back. I think there's enough substance and cool effects to justify a ticket and the posters chalking everything up to daddy issues are being lazy goons
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Sep 21, 2019 03:36
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I enjoyed the first two thirds of the film. The episodic journey through the solar system was fantastic. However, the final third, which should have had all the emotional payoff, really did not land. It felt very shallow, and dragged down the whole movie for me, despite previously thinking it was pretty good. A shame! Beautiful cinematography though.
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Sep 21, 2019 03:49
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Marx Headroom posted:I think there's enough substance and cool effects to justify a ticket and the posters chalking everything up to daddy issues are being lazy goons Yeah, it's not all daddy issues, though it's odd the extent to which the part where he takes over the Neptune launch is.
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Sep 21, 2019 04:28
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I really liked it. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I really liked it. I did not have a problem with the narration - in fact, there were moments where I quite liked it, and the fact that it's all him doing the psych eval at the end of the movie made it all connect to me - but I would like to see a no narration cut. Just silence. This movie had some great uses of sound. RE: the science problems - I didn't mind because I could clearly see that the movie was using space as a metaphor for Roy's desire to shield himself from others. There's no better way to visualize your character wanting to be alone than going on a spaceship and shooting off into the bleakness of space. I wanna see a double billing of this and First Man, though I honestly prefer First Man. stratofarius fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Sep 21, 2019 |
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Sep 21, 2019 04:42
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I liked it ok, but the crowd reception was rough. Packed out IMAX and I could hear constant yawning. Positives: parts of the world building were neat, like the Mars pattern camo, the space antenna, and the water tank on Mars. The idea of having a veteran astronaut go mad when he finds out we are alone is neat. While a bit silly, the Moon pirates chase was fun. Negatives: I didn’t understand the Lima ship at all. Ok, they’re getting far from the sun to search for aliens without the sun’s interference. Why does this cause their ship to start firing pulses at Earth?! Tommy Lee Jones seemed burned out, but not “kill all mankind,” why didn’t he turn that off? The commercialization of the moon made no sense and hurt the tone. Kept falling short of the Martian. Were Pitt and Jones shaving regularly? Do people just sit there for months of travel?
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Sep 21, 2019 06:41
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Negatives: I didn’t understand the Lima ship at all. Ok, they’re getting far from the sun to search for aliens without the sun’s interference. Why does this cause their ship to start firing pulses at Earth?! Tommy Lee Jones seemed burned out, but not “kill all mankind,” why didn’t he turn that off? TLJ says that it was the result of a mutiny gone wrong, and that he's been trying to fix it.
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Sep 21, 2019 06:47
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stratofarius posted:TLJ says that it was the result of a mutiny gone wrong, and that he's been trying to fix it. But wasn't the implication that the mutiny was 20+ years earlier? Did it suddenly break? I also didn't follow the transmission thing from Mars. If transmission is possible, and they received a reply to the plea, and if the dad was being honest you'd think it would be: 'Hi this is Mars the Lima is busy loving up Earth' 'Oh poo poo yeah the thing broke, i am at location X and trying to fix it, send a crew of mechanics' but by the time we reach Neptune the movie has completely forgotten about the transmission. This really kneecaps the final sequence because Brad and his dad have nothing really to talk about - like you'd think there would be some discussion or dialogue or climax here but we just get the pair of them making a statement each and they're .. done. There's the implication that Earthcom don't give a poo poo about the response and Dad replied with something and Earthcom just used that to get a fix, but ...
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Sep 21, 2019 07:40
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Effects worth the IMAX surcharge? I'll sit through a dumb movie if the visuals are worth it. (see Tron Legacy)
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Sep 21, 2019 07:58
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halokiller posted:Effects worth the IMAX surcharge? I'll sit through a dumb movie if the visuals are worth it. (see Tron Legacy) yeah I'd say so. It's visually incredible and should be seen on the biggest screen possible.
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Sep 21, 2019 08:01
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professor metis posted:yeah I'd say so. It's visually incredible and should be seen on the biggest screen possible. Yeah definitely, it does a better job than Interstellar at letting you linger on some of those wide shots.
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Sep 21, 2019 08:08
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xiw posted:But wasn't the implication that the mutiny was 20+ years earlier? Did it suddenly break? I think there were two mutinies, one twenty years ago and another when the movie started. Dad McBride says something about his loyal crew wanting to give up when he's rambling at Son McBride. The original crew mutinied halfway through the mission because of Space Madness unless I'm mistaken. I was baffled for a lot of the movie so whatever. The visuals and specific scenes were great but goddamm the plot felt like a disjointed mess. Things started off interesting enough and as the movie ground on scenes stopped having any relevance to the plot at large in favor of high concept symbolism. Hard pass IMO unless you're really interested in a two hour monologue of Captain Spaceman's emotional problems intercut with very pretty scenes of assorted things in space and close-ups of Brad Pitt's inhumanly tiny ears.
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Sep 21, 2019 08:56
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Marx Headroom posted:I think there's enough substance and cool effects to justify a ticket and the posters chalking everything up to daddy issues are being lazy goons Its not that I am trying to be lazy when I summed it up with daddy issues, the character is pretty complex and the whole compartmentalize thing is very much a plausible way to play a highly trained military background astronaut. Every astronaut biography I have read has the author talking about that mindset more than a few times. The reason I personally summed it up like that was because while I would definitely say that there is a certain type of viewer who is going to eat it all up and love everything about it, the first criticism my more casual film going friends came up with was "daddy issues" and you can be pretty sure its likely how a large portion of the audience is going to feel about it when they watch it. Loads of people are going to hear that its critically acclaimed, go to see it and then be bored to tears by this film. Its been quite a while since I saw anyone walk out of a film but this film took out 2 full groups at my showing.
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Sep 21, 2019 10:49
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The Natasha Lyonne cameo in this is so distracting that it seems like a rookie mistake.
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Sep 21, 2019 18:48
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The Natasha Lyonne cameo in this is so distracting that it seems like a rookie mistake. Seeing her immediately got me thinking about how much better Russian Doll was at this philosophical-entertainment game. For probably 1/1,000th of Ad Astra’s budget, it had heart, wit, and an understanding of how humans actually interact ... which, despite what this movie would have you believe, even 50-100 years from now will surely not consist of short, declarative, banal sentences interspersed with long pauses during which everyone looks sad and exhausted.
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Sep 21, 2019 19:55
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Chicken Butt posted:Seeing her immediately got me thinking about how much better Russian Doll was at this philosophical-entertainment game. For probably 1/1,000th of Ad Astra’s budget, it had heart, wit, and an understanding of how humans actually interact ... which, despite what this movie would have you believe, even 50-100 years from now will surely not consist of short, declarative, banal sentences interspersed with long pauses during which everyone looks sad and exhausted. In fairness, part of the premise is that almost everyone we meet is taking "mood stabilizers."
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Sep 21, 2019 19:58
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Chicken Butt posted:Seeing her immediately got me thinking about how much better Russian Doll was at this philosophical-entertainment game. For probably 1/1,000th of Ad Astra’s budget, it had heart, wit, and an understanding of how humans actually interact ... which, despite what this movie would have you believe, even 50-100 years from now will surely not consist of short, declarative, banal sentences interspersed with long pauses during which everyone looks sad and exhausted. I really liked this, I'm into anything that just says space will be a dump once capitalism takes flight. However, you definitely shouldn't have a 20 second cameo threaten to walk off with the movie.
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Sep 21, 2019 20:03
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You do kinda want the movie to start following her and see what her day is like as apparently the only person in the solar system with a personality.
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Sep 21, 2019 20:08
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It felt like a Terrence Malick light, without any of the flair.
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Sep 21, 2019 21:16
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Sir Kodiak posted:You do kinda want the movie to start following her and see what her day is like as apparently the only person in the solar system with a personality. Haha this is great I came into this thread expecting to see people gushing over it, given the review score and SA's proclivity toward Science Fiction. I thought I would be in the minority about disliking it. I don't have anything to add except that I really wish the ending had been some really cool poo poo with actual aliens. Instead we get dad drama that has not been earned at all
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Sep 21, 2019 22:26
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