Well, those were a few hours of my life I’ll never get back.
I found myself near a theater showing “Ad Astra” today, so, what the heck, I saw it. It’s profoundly awful.
Firstly, and most damningly, it’s utterly *boring.* I didn’t fall asleep, but I did check the time, sighed, closed my eyes and daydreamed. Stuff happens, but you Just Don’t Give A Rats Ass.
Secondly, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. The plot, the tech, the characters and the lack-of-science conspire to create story that comes off as gibberish.
Thirdly: the science is laughable. Just in case anyone cares about spoilers, the full rant is behind the break.
Remember that space station from the trailers that seems to be suspended from cables, perhaps dangling from a space elevator? Nope. It’s at the top of a non-tapering metal tower. A tower a hundred thousand or so feet tall, without benefit of guy wires to stabilize it. What’s the top of the tower for? Why… it has a few radio telescope dishes little bigger than a 1980’s backyard satellite dish, from where the United States listens for alien communications. Rather than in orbit or on the moon, where you can build ginormous dishes. Gah.
There is a scene with rovers tear-assing across the lunar surface. Fine. But they don’t kick up rooster tails of dust. Sigh, fine. But then, as they go driving across the surface, at one point Brad Pitt’s personality-free character holds up his hand into the *cloud* of dust suspended in the air. But as anyone who thinks about it for a second will recognize… dust doesn’t suspend motionlessly in the air as it does on Earth, because there’s no freakin’ air on the moon. The finest dust would plummet out of the lunar sky with the same acceleration as bits of gravel or boulders.
And there are a lot of “pirate” rovers on the lunar surface. To get from one “safe” US base to another, people drive through regions where they will be set upon and shot with guns and RPGs. Rather than, y’know, simply taking some sort of “rocket hopper.” And rather than, you know, going with an overhead military escort that could quickly spot enemy rovers (there not exactly being a lot of cover to hide under on the moon) and blast them to flinders.
A spacecraft flies from the moon to Mars, a journey said to take 19 days. This would require non-stop acceleration to pull off, on the order of 1-g the whole way. So of course we’re treated to freefall scenes. Additionally: as they head along their way they pick up a mayday from a Norwegian spacecraft, so they decide to pull alongside to investigate. The Norwegians are, IIRC, rendezvousing with some comet or other. So go ahead and do the math in your head about a ship on a fast transit from Earth to Mars *conveniently* finding itself not only near a non-Mars-bound spacecraft, but within easy delta V of said spacecraft. So… what are the Norwegians doing out there? Why, biomedical animal research, of course, because while it might make some sense to test animals in space, it obviously makes more sense to do so in deep space than in Earth orbit. And of course it’s a good idea to bring along violent and powerful baboons so that they can eat the crew and any rescuers who come on board. When Pitt dumps the atmosphere in the pressurized module, the baboon promptly explodes, Outland-style. The whole sequence is irrelevant to the plot; they don’t learn anything useful, nothing is gained, no meaningful time is lost. A minor character dies, which impedes the further continuation of the mission none whatsoever.
As can be gathered from the trailers, Tommy Lee Jones plays Brad Pitts father. Daddy wandered off on the first mission to Neptune *thirty* years earlier, and the whole mission vanished sixteen years later, no word since. For reasons left unexplored, Daddy’s spacecraft is sending pulses of Magic Energy towards Earth, pulses which are messing with things. So the US military wants him to stop. Their first step in making that happen is having Pitt send messages to Daddy via laser. OK, fine. But for reasons which are ill-or-not-explained, they can’t simply send the messages from Earth, but they have to do so from Mars. And they can’t just send recordings of Pitt from Earth to Mars for rebroadcast; they have to send Pitt to a recording studio on Mars, and broadcast *live.*
So a spacecraft is launched from Mars to Neptune. This is not a special deep-space ship, but the same one that was used as a standard transport from Earth to Mars. Travel time from Mars to Neptune? 80 days. A non-special ship can get to Neptune in less than three months. Yet in thirty freakin’ years there’ve been no followup missions to Neptune, apart from some “drones.” Pitt’s character stows away on board the rocket launching from Mars. The crew discovers this just as the rocket lifts off and they decide to lay a beatdown on him. So as the rocket is accelerating upwards, a “zero-g fistfight” breaks out. Zero-g, inside a ship that is boosting upwards. FREEFALL DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.
On board the ship orbiting Neptune, daddy is alone with a bunch of corpses, crew who died years earlier. They’re still floating around, bumping into the walls. But even though they’re a decade and a half dead, they generally look fresh and mostly intact. But… on the one hand, IIRC they were in pressurized parts of the ship, meaning they should have decayed to skeletons or mummified in that time. But if they are in a vacuum, the movie has already established that vacuum causes ape bodies to kerplode, so why are the humans intact?
For a movie titled “Ad Astra,” there is no star travel, no wide-eyed optimism, no sense of wonder. The special effect are serviceable, but Earth as seen from space is bland (unforgivable since “Gravity” showed a truly glorious Earth was possible) and Neptune looks like little more than an out of focus blue smudge. The closest I can come in terms of tone is the dismal and depressing “First Man.”
Bah.