Review of Ad Astra

This movie starts off on the wrong foot, with Brad Pitt's character McBride falls from a tower that apparently extends from the ground into outer space (you only learn that as he's falling and the tower is still there). He falls through the atmosphere and lives to open a parachute (what astronaut would pack a parachute?) and survive. I mean, how stupid is that? It's all down hill from there. Long drawn out, dull dialogue. A story line that seems like it was ripped out from a page of Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness, but with the execution of Roger Corman. Characters coming into the movie, seemingly significant, but really saying nothing you didn't already know or suspect. The director decided to liven up the dullness with a few random action scenes that made absolutely no sense. Pirates on the moon? huh? Not many places to hide, they could have easily been destroyed by a military force. And evil monkeys that took over a Norwegian space station, another random event. Oh, lets put duct tape over a broken helmet and make things all better. Then the terrible interaction between father and son, father saying he doesn't care, or never cared about his son, yet he communicated only when his son sent that message from Mars? He never sent any message to earth warning about the damaged antimatter generator, so earth believed he was trying to damage the Earth, 30 years later? Then you have the hilarious flying in space in only a suit, using a flimsy piece of metal to shield from an asteroid belt, to go from one space station to his ship with just the power of a spinning antenna, aiming it perfectly, over a distance of probably further than that between the earth and moon. And to top it off, he uses the nuclear blast to propel his ship all way from the outer solar system back to earth, another junk science moment. When did they design ships for nuclear blasts? And how would that get him back all the way to earth? Okay, at this point I know I'm rambling with point after point of bad moments, but that's what this movie is. When the movie was over, the audience was quiet or just laughing at the ridiculousness of this movie. Skip it.