Ad Astra

I went to see Ad Astra (2019) under ideal conditions—a friend asked me, spur of the moment, and I knew nothing about it, at least until seeing a poster of Brad Pitt in a space helmet outside of the auditorium. The title is a cool Latin phrase, briefly translated in the minimal opening credits. Sci-fi on a summer afternoon, you can't beat it if you're sci-fi geek like me; I never get tired of the movie depiction of gnarly hardware silently hurtlin' thru the cosmos. If you're having the misfortune of reading this instead of going to the movie first, I'll just tell you: this is a terrible, terrible movie and you'd be wise to skip it, unless you're even more a sci-fi geek than I am and have to see them all—or you want to prove me wrong, which is another game we can play. Anyway, for me, the cinema is well beyond life support, and now we're just digging up corpses, I guess. That the only two Hollywood movies I saw all summer is this and the Tarantino one—and the fact that Brad Pitt plays the chillest guy in world in both—strikes me as perverse. Brad re-writes history in both, but also the laws of science in this one (now that Pluto is no longer a planet, we can get to the edge of the solar system in the time it takes to get to an LA beach), and instead of merely saving Sharon Tate, he saves mankind form the most heinous threat yet imagined: power surges. I've read enough movie scripts to know I would have thrown this one across the room, and I've written enough to know that the brief intoxication you get from an idea like “Apocalypse Now... in Space!” mixed with re-watching Terrence Malick, some Wikipedia mythology, and Moby-Dick CliffNotes—and with plenty of Red Bull and Adderall, you can get to 180 pages in a self-delusional flurry. Apparently enough people have these issues with their fathers being assholes that this father-son thing resonates? Or the Christian market is actually this big now? I haven't had this much God shoved down my throat since the last time I watched a Jimmy Swaggart camp meeting, but frankly, as I believe myself to be a moral person, I prefer brother Jimmy's bourbon soaked transgression to enduring the on-line therapy sessions with a guy whose emotional and spiritual reawakening comes at the price of murdering several (oddly, Christian) space cops, hooking up with his nutso dad in a deep space trailer park, finding God thru his digital photos, and then solving the power surge crisis with one big bomb which has the convenient extra benefit of... poof!—propelling him right back home into the arms of his hot lady who he's now ready to commit to. In a way, it's reassuring that dumb shit like this gets made, but still, I can't forgive it for teasing us with Donald Sutherland and then abandoning him like cheap carry-on luggage at the moon-port.

Randy Russell 9.23.19