And so, when I read about the new
Brad Pitt movie Ad Astra, which was receiving good reviews and
Oscar buzz, I dragged my son to the mall to see it. I should have saved myself
the time, the thirty-four dollars and the aggravation of trying to get a teenager
to do anything with me on a Saturday night. In a word, Ad Astra was
dreadful. As in the Neil Armstrong film First Man, the director
made just about every wrong choice he could have, and the script was awful. How
anyone allowed lines like "I can't go to Mars with you," and
"I'm on my way to Neptune" to get onto the screen is as mysterious as
deep space to me.
About forty minutes into the film I
ceased caring whether Brad Pitt ever found his father or not. We were beaten
over the head so many times with the son-in-search-of-missing-father routine
that, in fact, I hoped he wouldn't just to spite him. The incessant internal
monologues were aimless, poorly written and, eventually, anesthetizing. Again,
as in First Man, the actor and director chose, for some unfathomable
reason, to strip the main character of nearly all emotion, rendering him
uninteresting and unengaging. Brad Pitt's facial expression never changes, and
the repeated resort to the cyber psychological evaluation only served to
reinforce the fact that this was not a human being so much as an extension of
technology and the result of bad parenting. His character feels somewhere
between Nicholas Cage's drunk in Leaving Las Vegas (which,
apparently, Brad does) and Robocop.
There was a motif of flashbacks to
his former life when, hard as it is to believe, he was happy, but his devotion
to his job trashed that. Now, usually in the case of a character whose past is
catching up and whose regrets are haunting him, we care about his emotional
health and his prospects for redemption. Not this time. There was so little in
Brad's character to involve us emotionally that it made no difference to me whether he ever saw either his father or his ex-wife again. And when, finally, having returned
from Neptune he meets up with her in a coffee shop, the insignificant morphs
into the unintentionally comic.
Right around the time I stopped
caring about whether Brad would find Tommy Lee Jones, I realized that Ad
Astra is a remake of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
The only clever invention of the film is that it turns Conrad's seeker and the
crazy Congo recluse Kurtz into father and son, thus opening the floodgates for
an unstoppable elegy of remorse inside Brad Pitt's head. There are so many
closeups of the movie star's face that I began trying to count the visible pores
in his nose, since there wasn't much else to occupy me. But I digress...
The choice of Donald Sutherland as
the ancient astronaut who is supposed to accompany Brad to Neptune was
mystifying. He was far too old for such a trip to be in any way credible and, in fact, the first thing he does when he gets to the lunar base
is to have a heart attack. (Why the geniuses who chose him didn’t see this
coming is puzzling.) This is when his character gets to utter the immortal
line, "I can't go to Mars with you." When Brad makes it to the
moon he goes on a rover excursion to the Mars launch base, only to be - get
this - attacked by lunar bandits in hot rod rovers. Now, I ask you: Where did
these anonymous Mad Max hijackers come from? How did they get to the moon? Where do
they live? Where do they park their rovers? And most puzzling of all: How
hard can it be to find bandits on the moon? Do they occupy some secret
crater that no one knows of? Are they being protected by a corrupt local
sheriff? This sequence was not just improbable, it was ridiculous. Banditos on
the moon? You've got to be kidding me. They don’t even have water there let
alone tequila
I won't say much about the special effects and art direction, though that is what I enjoy the most about space movies. But in Ad Astra, they were really quite conventional and showed me nothing that I had not seen done, and done better, several times before. Even fifty years ago Kubrick's Space Odyssey technology was more impressive on a technical and design level, and Ridley Scott's spaceships in Alien were far better than those in this new 80-million-dollar film.
I won't say much about the special effects and art direction, though that is what I enjoy the most about space movies. But in Ad Astra, they were really quite conventional and showed me nothing that I had not seen done, and done better, several times before. Even fifty years ago Kubrick's Space Odyssey technology was more impressive on a technical and design level, and Ridley Scott's spaceships in Alien were far better than those in this new 80-million-dollar film.
I could go on citing the film's
foibles, and I think I will, touching only on the most egregious ones. Brad
Pitt manages to stow away on a Mars rocket. And how does he do it? By swimming
through an underground lake on the moon (we are never told where the water came from) and
climbing up into the rocket's exhaust mere seconds before it lifts off. When he
gets into the air lock, the three crew members try to subdue him, resulting in (a) weightless Kung Fu fighting and (b) the deaths of all three of them. I’m
sorry to be the one to point it out, but at this point Brad's character is
guilty of at least three counts of negligent homicide. But this fact seems
either to have escaped the filmmakers' notice, or it simply doesn't concern
them, since all that matters is getting Brad, now alone, to Neptune.
By this time we have learned that
his father, Tommy Lee Jones, has, thirty years before, commanded an expedition
to the edge of the Solar System in search of intelligent life beyond. In the
process, he has gone wacko and murdered all the other members of his crew.
This makes him a serial killer, another fine point of morality which escaped
the filmmakers, though it does introduce a like-father-like-son theme. Both of
them, no matter what we think of their sufferings or their exploits, are
murderers, and anywhere back on Earth they'd be facing life in a super-max prison, which
makes the long schlep to Neptune look like a Sunday stroll in Griffith Park.
En route to Mars, the commander of
the top-secret ship in which Brad is being transported decides to stop to help
a stranded Norwegian science vessel (a Norwegian spaceship?) over Brad’s rather limp-wristed
objection. When they enter the ship, which everyone in the audience knows they
should not, they are attacked by – get this – the flying monkeys from The Wizard
of Oz. I’m not making this up, folks: The ships’ commander has his face
eaten by ravenous weightless monkeys.
Well, they finally find each other,
Brad and Tommy, out by Neptune and there ensues some of the most inept and pointless dialog
you will find in modern filmmaking. Most of what Tommy Lee says is pedantic and meaningless,
and the only thing that Brad contributes of any originality is a single
carefully framed tear. This is supposed to make us think that he has finally
dealt with his grief and begun a new chapter in his emotional life. Nonsense.
One tear doth not redemption make.
This sequence is the intellectual and emotional climax of the film. The entire extravaganza comes down to a single line muttered by Tommy Lee: We are all we have. Is this something no one ever thought of before? Did we have to go a billion miles into space to discover this? Is this all that Tommy’s character gleaned from three decades of total isolation: that we need one another? What were the filmmakers thinking?
This sequence is the intellectual and emotional climax of the film. The entire extravaganza comes down to a single line muttered by Tommy Lee: We are all we have. Is this something no one ever thought of before? Did we have to go a billion miles into space to discover this? Is this all that Tommy’s character gleaned from three decades of total isolation: that we need one another? What were the filmmakers thinking?
I won't tell you what happens when
they finally decide to go back to Earth together, to face, I hope, a judge and
jury, but let me say that it is as inconsequential, predictable and chock-full of contradictions and improbabilities as everything else in the film. When Brad finally coaxes Tommy into his space
suit, which must be thirty years old, it looks almost exactly like Brad’s
suit. Hasn’t the technology improved in three decades? And this raises other
questions in the inquiring mind: What did he eat for thirty years? Did he brush
and floss? Didn’t he run out of toilet paper? Presumably, having killed
everyone else on board there was more for him, but for thirty years? Three decades with no companionship, no one to talk to, nothing but himself, and Tommy's character, while a bit melancholy, is still focused and lucid? Anyone under those circumstances would long since have gone completely nuts and probably killed himself. At least Kurtz had the company of his adoring minions. But not in the alternative universe of Ad Astra. Once again, the father-like-son
motif rears its head: These two creatures, whatever else they may be, are not
human.
Then, of
course Brad makes the long solo trip home (since Brad in this movie, like
Sandra Bullock in Gravity and Matt Damon in The
Martian) cannot be left to die in space. In space, it seems, movie stars
are not expendable. Having suffered through the agonizing trip to find his father only to lose him again, Brad does make it back to
Earth, though, oddly, he programs his spaceship to take him to the Moon. It
seems the computer was off by 240,000 miles since Brad lands near (I think) Lake Mead where he started, a stone's throw from Vegas. It is there, I suppose,
that he finally reunites with his ex in a coffee shop which clearly is not
Starbucks. What a pity the writer didn't take advantage of this chance to make
a devilishly clever pun. If he had, at least I would have had something to
relate to, since Brad went to the stars and my thirty-four bucks went to him.
Ugh! I thought Interstellar
was bad with its dust bowl and bookcase, but Ad Astra nearly put me off
space films forever.
