j* movie reviews 2020

Ad Astra (2019)

A few minutes of Fight Club wish fulfilment in two hours of boredom no one needed to see.

Oh dear lordy I knew I was going to hate this. I dodged it so hard in cinemas and I've been trying to avoid it ever since. I was all "this looks like that Interstellar bullshit in a new flavour." And it's not even trying to be as clever as Interstellar. It doesn't even have a walking-talking fridge. This review is a spoiler filled slag-off and I'm warning you about both these things. Bail now.

This movie is the most incredibly dull thing I have seen in a long time. I will start with high points. Brad Pitt is great at "inner emotional turmoil" acting and his eyes are very expressive. There is very good lighting used throughout, and some nice space-looking sets. That's all I've got.

This movie is basically a movie about Brad Pitt going to find his elderly father (Tommy Lee Jones) who's gone a bit whack and probably needs to go into a retirement home. That's the heart of this film: facing up to your senile dad. You can put as many freaking sci-fi looking backdrops and rockets and planets in shot as you like, but it's still a senile dad story. And as such it is a particular flavour of dreary family drama, peppered with heaps of father-son woe. Daddy never loved him. Woe. Woe. Woe.

Space Monkeys! Like a monkey shot into space and then experimented on... then it turns on its captors to eat them. This, somewhat amazing premise actually happens in this movie! WTF? There are maybe three whole minutes of entertainment when zero-gravity baboons are drifting around a spacecraft trying to kill Brad Pitt. Honestly. I imagine early test screenings saw people say "this film is so boring, needs more action" and then a whole creative crew tried to brainstorm action for Brad Pitt in space.

And no-one could escape the Fight Club space-monkey connection and then they just had to do it. I mean it's good, I'd totally dig an entire film of Brad Pitt fighting zero-G baboons. Because that's an epic sci-fi horror premise right there. But it just seemed such an odd choice in an otherwise duller-than-dull film. It also set up the idea that maybe returning to Earth would be Planet of the Apes wild, but no, it was not. It was just as dull as all the space had been.

Other weird action sequences include a stupid "Moon Max" lunar buggy chase where bad guys kill a lot of people as they cross a wasteland between lunar bases and the new rocket launch. Sort out your airport security, Moon! Most of this film is in transit. Earth to Moon, Moon to Mars, Mars to Neptune. The weirdest thing that happened whilst watching this is that my brain completely blanked Neptune - it wouldn't accept it as a planet anymore. I kept asking where they were going and my partner kept saying "Neptune" and I was all "that's not even a planet, is it a moon?" Maybe because Event Horizon also takes place (in a horrifically entertaining way) near Neptune and I've blocked the whole planet out.

The only other thing of note is that Liv Tyler gets to play the abandoned space-wife again, reprising her role in Armageddon, but there is nothing hot about this relationship. There is no drilling. No sexualised biscuit games. Just Liv Tyler recording video messages about how dull Brad is. Everyone in this film keeps talking about how Brad Pitt's heart rate never gets over 80bpm, and I'm like "it's because he's dead inside!" My heart rate didn't raise in anyway during this film. I was more excited when it finished and I had to google and accept Neptune is a real planet.

"Per aspera ad astra" means "through hardships to the stars" and I did the hardships, and this is all the star it gets:

J* gives it 1 star.

PS: "Let Liv Tyler go to Space" or at least drill something (it's a Vulture article).