Ad Astra (2019)

Spoilers ahead, for everything, because you deserve so much better than what this movie has to offer.

In 1951, famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story called “The Sentinel” about a weird monolith found on the moon.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick worked with Clarke to turn that into “2001: A Space Odyssey” (the book of the same name was written concurrently), where weird space drama happened. There was trippy music and a floating fetus and a very white room, and a lot of people died.
In 2013, Sharlto Copley starred in “Europa Report” (2013), about a fictional, near-future NASA mission that sent a crew to Jupiter’s moon Europa, with the intent of looking for a potential colony planet and everyone died.
In 2014, Matthew McConaughey decided that “love” was somehow a physical property of the universe in “Interstellar,” and Hans Zimmer wasted his considerable talents writing a score that was magnitudes better than the movie. Some people died.
In 2015, Andy Weir’s outstanding novel “The Martian” was made into a movie of the same name, about astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) getting stranded on Mars for over a year and becoming a space pirate. No one died.

Then 2019 rolled around, wherein director James Gray decided to take all of the above stories and put them in a blender, sifted out the good parts, and threw them away.
Then he took the bad parts, licked them, and smeared them all over some film.
And that’s how we got “Ad Astra” (2019), or as my brother first succinctly described it to me: “The Sad Astronaut Movie.”

Now, because Matt Damon and Brad Pitt are apparently real-life friends with a competitive streak, Damon’s role in “The Martian” must have been the incentive for Pitt to take on “Ad Astra,” presumably against everyone’s wishes and general common sense.

To highlight that:
If a friend decided to tell you about their screenplay and it included the line “and then they find an abandoned space station full of murder-baboons!” you would tell them to be ashamed of themselves and go back to their keyboards and continue to be ashamed of themselves.
James Gray, however, heard that line and presumably got rock hard, because that’s not only a scene in this movie, but a prominent waste of 20 minutes with absolutely zero point or payoff.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the plot; we’ll come back to the baboons.

In the year 2050-ish, Major Roy McBride is an astronaut for the United States Space Command (USSC). He’s also the narrator of the movie, so we’re abused by his unending melancholy stream-of-conscious monologue.
Somehow, despite this movie being made during the Trump presidency where the concept of a dedicated space branch of the DOD was no longer silly talk, the USSC in this movie was somehow not a dedicated branch. McBride was an Army major, and we met a Navy lieutenant, both of whom worked for the USSC in various positions throughout the solar system. Unclear where the Air Force was and why they didn’t seem to be involved in any way.
Somewhere in there, the Army transitioned from green/brown OCP camo uniforms to grey-pattern camo with grey-stitched nametapes, to make it as hard as possible to identify each other and to blend in with space, I guess.

The movie opened with Roy working on “The International Space Telescope,” which was a stupid and implausible cross between a space elevator and a radio telescope that was apparently rooted somewhere on Earth and had two very small radio dishes at the top.
I cannot fathom why any government would waste money on that when there were moon and Mars colonies and innumerable research stations throughout the inner half of our solar system.
It exploded, because it was an affront to God.

Then we were introduced to Colonel Thomas Pruitt (Donald Southerland), a very old man who spent his entire time doing his best Donald Southerland impression, who absolutely should not have been allowed to climb into a rocket ship or still be on active duty.
Col. Pruitt had been friends with Col. H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), father of Major McBride, and mission commander of the doomed, top secret “Lima Project” – a listening station orbiting Neptune with the goal of finding evidence of alien life.
Pruitt had been tasked with ‘guiding’ (read: handling) Roy on behalf of the USSC, because apparently Space Command was both inept and actively malicious. When a mysterious burst of [science mumbo-jumbo] hit Earth and caused a series of electrical storms across the planet, the USSC immediately deduced that it was somehow an attack by the Lima Project, and that Col. McBride was using the [other science mumbo-jumbo]-based engines from his station to attack Earth because this movie needed a way to justify itself.
It turns out that the USSC had lost contact with the Lima Project 30 years ago, which is when the project began; they’ve basically never had contact with it, so it’s pretty inscrutable that they decided that not only were the impossibly-aimed “attacks” coming from a very small station on the far side of the solar system, but that they were some kind of revenge attacks by a man who should have died decades prior.
The USSC wanted Roy to go to a top-secret base on Mars to record a message to send to Neptune to see if they could get a response from Col. McBride. Regardless of those results, the USSC was then going to blow up whatever remained of the Lima Project, because why not. Obviously the USSC did not tell Roy about this last bit, or we would have been spared the whole movie.
So Roy dutifully climbed into a shuttle headed for the moon and landed at a very well-established moon-base that was somehow also a tourist destination. Roy’s monologue stated that the moon was divided up for military and mining purposes, so why you would travel there for anything other than business is a complete mystery to me.
It was also explained that there weren’t firm legal/corporate boundaries between the mining sites and whatever land the Earth-bound governments wanted, so there was a bizarre mish-mash of corporate wars and pseudo-military skirmishes that just happened on the lunar surface.
Because this movie is allergic to logic and reason, the rocket that Roy needed to take from the moon to Mars was not located at the joint civilian-military spaceport, but at a “secret” spaceport on the dark side of the moon, which was used for joint civilian-military transport.
Roy’s transit to the “secret” port involved him riding an Apollo 11-style moon buggy in a convoy, and getting ambushed by another convoy of moon buggies who belonged to… someone…
These moon-pirates killed the Navy lieutenant in charge of the convoy and the other nine people traveling, so the only two that made it were Roy and Col. Pruitt. The ambush was never discussed, and Pruitt was promptly written out of the movie.

At the secret base, Roy climbed into the Bucephalus, the shuttle set to take him and two other passengers and two pilots to Mars.
Along the way they received a mayday signal from a space station; regulations stated that any passing ships must stop and assist a distress call, so the captain of the Bucephalus slipped out to go check – Roy went with him for good measure.
The captain was then eaten by baboons, who had presumably also eaten the original human crew, and Roy solved that problem by blowing them out the airlock.
Now, why you would take a pair of aggressive omnivores with 5” fangs out into deep space in a confined enclosure for research is something the movie never even pretended to want to explain.

The co-pilot, visibly shaken by seeing the monkey-munched remains of his friend, was in no shape to land the Bucephalus on Mars and almost crashed it. Fortunately, Roy knew exactly how to pilot this particular shuttle and saved the day, then actively chose not to tell anyone that said co-pilot was no longer capable of safely piloting anything.

Once on Mars, Roy was given a series of USSC-approved letters to read during a ‘live’ broadcast to Neptune. During the second recording, Roy was so gosh-darned tired of the whole ordeal that he broke script and told dad how much he missed him.
Apparently, Col. McBride was listening, all the way out there, because there was an immediate response from the Lima Project.
Keep in mind: it takes 20 minutes for a one-way communique from Earth to Mars, and we’re 59 million miles apart. Mars and Neptune are separated by 2.7 billion miles.
Here’s something that bothered me immediately: Col. McBride “disappeared” when Roy was a kid, which means that literally any of the 700+ men living in the Mars colony could have spoken into the microphone and pretended to be Roy to elicit a response, so there’s no reason the USSC needed to send Roy all the way out there.
Or, assuming that Col. McBride somehow knew what his son would sound like, why Roy couldn’t have recorded the message from Earth – at 2.7 billion miles, an extra 59 million would have been peanuts.

Bingo-bango plot contrivances and holes: Roy found out that his dad had killed the rest of the crew on the Lima Project because they wanted to go back to Earth and he had gone absolutely bat-shit crazy, so Roy had to sneak back onto the Bucephalus, which had been commandeered from the USSC, by the USSC, to nuke the Lima Project out of existence.
Roy’s sneaking somehow included him underwater. On Mars. In his space suit.
This enabled him to access the airlock located between the engine nozzles of the shuttle as it was taking off, allowing him to crawl inside without being incinerated or destroying any part of the ship.
The crew inside was the same as the crew who’d come with him from the moon, except now he was illegally present and everyone else was reduced to a slave to the script and promptly tried to murder him. Three ridiculous actions later and all three crew were dead, leaving Roy alone on the Bucephalus for the indeterminate length of time required to travel to the farthest planet in our solar system.

Three pages ago, I noted that this takes place somewhere around 2050; the hand-held technology every character had was the logical progression of the smartphones we have now.
So why did a majority of large-scale technology look like it came from the early 2000s?
The recent SpaceX Dragon capsule that took NASA astronauts to the ISS is filled entirely with touchscreens and is fully automated. It’s shiny and white and looks like the future.
The Bucephalus should not have looked like it was the Space Shuttle’s slightly more athletic cousin; it should have looked practically Star Trekkian on the inside.
“The Martian” only took place in the 2030s and the Aries looked magnitudes better.

Roy eventually made it to the Lima Project and found that his dad was impossibly still alive, and for some reason still had the corpses of his dead crew in there with him.
I can only assume it was a weird sex thing, because it was established that those people had been dead for a long time, even though the entire concept of biological decay somehow didn’t exist that far out in space.

Col. McBride then launched himself out into space, because that was really the only proper ending for his character.
Successfully bringing him back to Earth would have made this an even worse movie.

There was a stupid final scene of Roy launching himself back toward the Bucephalus through Neptune’s ice rings, which worked flawlessly, because of course it did, and then he got back to Earth and everything was fine, including his previously-failed relationship with unnamed attractive female partner (Liv Tyler).

One of the many things that bothered me about this was the way the script didn’t let characters behave the way humans would behave. There were no humans here, just two-dimensional golems that looked and sounded like humans and waited for their overlords to direct them.
You may be thinking “well, yes, it’s a movie, they’re all scripted characters.”
Right, but that’s not the issue.
The problem is when a script is so poorly written that a character’s behaviors happen because the script needs them to happen – the established character development doesn’t support anyone behaving in such a way. It was obvious with Roy’s inability to form bonds with other characters (a detail which his monologuing poorly tried to explain away), the way the USSC generals completely floundered around their process of solving the Lima Project issue, the entirety of the dialog for Dr. Pruitt, and the crew of the Bucephalus immediately trying to kill Roy despite knowing exactly who he was and what he’d done for them on the way to Mars.
It’s the same kind of flat, barely-there development that allows any-and-all body-snatcher/body-swap movies to happen.

The music for this movie was spectacularly awful.
It was boring, bland, or non-existent, often somehow all three at the same time.

The special effects weren’t even good – while the various colonies and ships looked real-enough from the outside, every zero-G scene looked like Roy was laying on plexiglass and slowly waiving his limbs, putting it on par with the quality of the ‘weightless’ effects from “Barbarella” (1968).

I cannot believe how bad this movie was.
I am truly flabbergasted that this movie has an 83% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
I could have tolerated Roy’s running monologue OR the contrived pirates and monkeys OR the weirdly evil military branch OR two-dimensional characters.
No movie should have more than two of those, and for some reason this movie had all four.
Do not waste two hours of your time on this, no matter how much you think you like Brad Pitt.