"Ad Astra" starts out well, but it deteriorates as it goes along, and absolutely nothing about the last half hour or so of the movie works at all.
The narrative doesn't work, the acting doesn't work, the science doesn't work. Brad Pitt isn't a terrible actor, but he's limited, and he's certainly not good enough to carry off a movie like this, despite the fact that there is near-constant voice over just telling us what his character is thinking. The film I guess looks nice, but there's nothing in this you haven't already seen in films like "Gravity" or "First Man." There's a droning, monotonous tone to the whole thing that makes it feel very long.
And that ending. Ooof. The whole movie builds up to a confrontation between Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, playing his long-lost dad, but both actors play the scene like next-door neighbors who run into each other in the alley and discuss whether or not they should go get some pizza. There's some psycho-babble about whether or not Pitt should let his dad go, figuratively and literally, before the film's most preposterous plot device that involves a nuclear explosion propelling Pitt's spaceship all the way from Neptune back to Earth. Or at least, I think that's what happened.
I'll give this film some points for trying to be a movie for adults, a rare find these days, but I'd like some movies that are both for adults AND good.
And what the heck was with the killer monkeys? I kept waiting for that scene to plug into the bigger picture of what was going on but it never did.
Grade: C.
The narrative doesn't work, the acting doesn't work, the science doesn't work. Brad Pitt isn't a terrible actor, but he's limited, and he's certainly not good enough to carry off a movie like this, despite the fact that there is near-constant voice over just telling us what his character is thinking. The film I guess looks nice, but there's nothing in this you haven't already seen in films like "Gravity" or "First Man." There's a droning, monotonous tone to the whole thing that makes it feel very long.
And that ending. Ooof. The whole movie builds up to a confrontation between Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, playing his long-lost dad, but both actors play the scene like next-door neighbors who run into each other in the alley and discuss whether or not they should go get some pizza. There's some psycho-babble about whether or not Pitt should let his dad go, figuratively and literally, before the film's most preposterous plot device that involves a nuclear explosion propelling Pitt's spaceship all the way from Neptune back to Earth. Or at least, I think that's what happened.
I'll give this film some points for trying to be a movie for adults, a rare find these days, but I'd like some movies that are both for adults AND good.
And what the heck was with the killer monkeys? I kept waiting for that scene to plug into the bigger picture of what was going on but it never did.
Grade: C.