Ad Astra

I've been posting a lot of movie reviews lately, and I was going to stop posting movie reviews because I want this to be a Tech Blog and not a Movie Reviews Blog.

But I have to write about Ad Astra. It's a bad movie, and no one else seems to think so. I don't understand it.

First of all, the movie is maybe 70% exposition. And I'm not just talking about exposition by title cards, though the movie has that; and I'm not just talking about exposition by narration, although the movie has that too, in spades. But almost every character, including Brad Pitt, spends the first half of the movie just wandering around saying things like, "My father, he most decorated astronaut in the history of the program. US Air Force Academy, his doctorate at MIT..." To say nothing of the continual psych evals that Brad Pitt has to take, so that he can look into the camera and tell us how he's feeling.

Speaking of the psych evals! The fact that Brad Pitt just moans and moans about how he's feeling fine, and then the robot is like, "Well, you sound totally good, psych eval passed," highlights how blatant the holes are in the reality of this film. And it's not just the psych evals. It's the way that half of our astronauts are all in their 50s and up. It's the way that everyone crucial to finding the Lima Project is also severely emotionally compromised by the Lima Project. It's the way the military rocket decides to stop en route to help a stranded Norwegian science spaceship. Do you think the Navy would put aside their military exercises to help a sinking ship? A little after this, one of the astronauts gets mauled by a crazed ape, and they just bring the astronaut back into their ship. Is this the same space program that stopped Ken Mattingly from riding Apollo 13 because he hadn't had the measles vaccine? Later on in the film, Brad Pitt has a knife fight with a bunch of astronauts during takeoff. They're all weightless for some reason while the rocket is accelerating through the martian atmosphere. One of the guys fires a gun inside the ship and releases some toxic gas, I don't know. I don't get it.

The weirdest part is that someone did clearly put some thought into this film. When Brad Pitt arrives on Mars, you can briefly see a sign in the background trying to warn against suicide--as if someone had gotten so sick of life on Mars that they wanted to end it all by going outside. Someone noticed and put the effort into the details. And then they're like, "Look, we did a news:"

The characters are, without exception, 1-dimensional. I don't believe in Brad Pitt's character's, like, internal agony. He has no reason to feel the way he does. Or not feel the way he does. We're just told that he doesn't feel. We're told that TLJ has gone crazy. We're told that he has some ambiguous relationship with his father; his father likes musicals or something. That's their relationship. We need some flashbacks here. We need some more Tommy Lee Jones in the movie. He's got two speaking lines and then we meet him and he's loopy and doesn't say much. And then he kills himself for no reason.

This film wants to be Interstellar but it's taking all of its cues from Armageddon. In Armageddon I didn't care that they brough a Glock to space, because the movie wasn't meant to be a space movie: it was a disaster movie, which happened to take place in space. Space was incidental. But then this movie starts bringing up the Drake Equation and they put Brad Pitt in an anechoic chamber and you're like, "Well well well this must be a Science Movie," and then Brad Pitt climbs up the side of a rocket during liftoff and then the crew of that rocket immediately unbuckle and start firing guns.

To say nothing of the multitude of visual homages that director James Gray is trying to pull off here. Off the top of my head: 2001: A Space Odyssey keeps popping up whenever people are moving around in spaceships; Interstellar is referenced in all of the lens flares; Gravity when the two guys are tethered together while flying through space; The Martian when Pitt does some sort of self-surgery on his obliques; Sunshine when they use long red-tinted cuts and then long blue-tinted cuts. All of which just makes you think of the better movies you could be watching than this.

When Brad Pitt finds Tommy Lee Jones, it occurred to me that I don't actually know what either of these characters want. TLJ wants to find aliens, but it sounds like he wants to find little green men with laser guns and flying cars. "No sign of consciousness." I'm not sure what Pitt wants. To bring his father back to earth, I guess? But then what? Pitt clearly finds no fun with anyone on Earth. And it's not like we've had any backstory where he feels like he misses his father, like he wants to see him again. I don't believe in that.

Something else I didn't like but couldn't find a spot for

This movie has a weird prejudice against screens. Every interface is a vocal interface. There's always someone talking in the background, talking through a speaker, speaking some content that belongs in text, on a screen. Things like "Approaching Neptune," or "Please enter your access code." I think if I was trying to be generous, I'd say that maybe they're trying to show us how people are disconnected from each other, that we can only communicate with other people through machines. (Maybe that'd explain why Brad Pitt is so upset throughout the movie.) But comes across as clunky and ham-fisted, since 9 out of 10 times, the content would be served through a screen in regular old 2020. When you turn on your computer, it doesn't say, "Please enter your password." And then you certainly don't have to say your password out loud, so the whole room can hear.

Brad Pitt's story arc

1. Depressed anhedonic weirdo
2. Depressed anhedonic space pirate
3. Find dad
4. Dad kills self
5. ???
6. "I am active and engaged. I will live, and love."

The credits

This movie has too many bloody producers.

The reviews

Somehow this movie has top-score reviews from lots of people who seem to know what they're talking about. I don't get it. The film was bereft of scientific accuracy; there was no character to speak of, from any of the people who walked around on screen; the story was patchwork; Pitt and TLJ seemed to be emotionally checked-out. I don't know what to say. I don't know how Richard Roeper can give this film 3.5/4 stars.

Stray observations

• Having a special code that opens any spaceship (like the one they used when attending the stranded space monkey ship) seems like a bad idea in a world with space pirates.
• These "comfort rooms" appear to be anything but. I like how they put Pitt in time out there when he finally fails a psych eval.
• The patch on Brad Pitt's shoulder is so abnormally large.
• Before the spaceship takes off from Mars, they say that they're planning a launch at 7:52 UTC. Why the heck are they using UTC on Mars? Use Mars time! Wouldn't 7:52 UTC on Mars be a different time of day, every day?
• The way that the lady was like, "Do you want a hot towel? I really appreciate you flying with us, thank you so much for flying with us," really makes me want to fly Virgin Atlantic.
• Wait--Virgin Atlantic? Virgin has a spaceship company! Why are they flying Virgin Atlantic.

I see what people mean when they say that this movie is a return to form for Pixar. Pixar does it's best work when it takes abstract concepts and puts life and feelings into them to make them approachable from an everyman's perspective. Now and again you'll see someone repeating the old saw about how each of Pixar's films is just "What if X had feelings?" But I think Pixar takes it a step further that that: they also ask, "...and what does that mean for us, as living, feeling people?"

And this is Pixar at its best. From an aesthetic point of view, I'd say that this one's even better than Toy Story 4. I think that the 'souls' are really interesting to look at in the beginning--the weird focus, the shimmer, the gradient on them like in old film; but they sort of fade into the background after a little while, especially when 'shot' close up. The eyes are traditional plasticky-looking 3D animation, while the body itself is that lightly fuzzy texture we first say in Inside Out. Neither on its own looks bad, but when you put them next to each other it's a little... off. The real world, however, is something else to behold. Easily their most technically astonishing world. It doesn't look real--it looks the way that you wish that real looked.

I think using Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was also a terrific choice. I could listen to this movie, no visuals at all. The title cards are breathtaking. I don't throw around that word, either. Reznor and Ross are absolutely on form here. The juxtaposition of their unobtrusive ambient soundscapes with the more 'conventional' jazz music works a lot better than you think it would. Especially considering that this is a "children's" film (in the sense that Pixar's films are never just for children).

If I had to pick something I wasn't a huge fan of, maybe I'd say the structure was a little wonky. I liked that we had an opening scene, before our introduction to the soul-world; but once we were in soul-world it sort of felt like we were going to stay there for a while and explore--that these were our characters and we were going to stick with them. Which made it a little jarring when, a third of the way through the movie, we took a right turn back into the real world, and our characters started looking different. It wasn't disorienting per se--it just took a minute to get back into. And but after this the movie caught its stride, and everything fell back into place.

I'm also not sure that I'm coming away with it with that sense of awe, the wake that I've come away with after watching other movies--Pixar or otherwise. Some movies stick with you for a few days, you know? You go back and watch a couple of scenes again and notice things you'd missed. You want to talk about it with someone else. And I don't think I've got that. I don't think this is the film's fault: the message of the film (which only really emerges from about halfway through) is basically the same message as DFW's This is Water, which I've just about been indoctrinated with. So maybe I'm not the ideal audience. Not to say I'm not receptive.

But it makes ranking the film here a bit tough. I'm inclined to give it a 4/5 because I'm not coming away with that wake, like I said; but I'd also have given Toy Story 4 a 4/5, and Soul was better than Toy Story 4; for all that it was a technical achievement, it really was just a thorough nostalgia trip for folks in their late twenties. But this isn't a Toy Story 4 review. So I've pulled a Fantano. Strong 4.

As a movie about a power-hungry upperclass that overreaches and is undone by its own desire to rule, I think it's a fine movie. I like the juxtaposition of jazz music and the sort of 1980's-lived-in-science-fiction world, though by 2001, when the movie came out, I think that we were probably getting a little weary of this sort of grimy sci-fi world, having lived through Star Wars, Aliens, Blade Runner, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. That's a minor quibble, though—overall, things here were just fine.

I did think that the movie failed on a couple of fronts. And I think that these failures depend on taking the movie seriously, and trying to reason with its script; though it's not clear to me that it wants to be thatkind of movie. Maybe it's just a weirdly violent kids' movie.

But, assuming that it's a movie for critical-eyed adults, here's what I wasn't crazy about:

The value of a robot

The first 20 minutes of the movie seem to delivery a pretty clear message: society is propped-up by an underclass of human labour, and that under-class is being slowly replaced by an even-lower class of robots, whom humans treat like garbage despite the fact that they show emotion, desire, and fear. We're meant to sympathise with the robot plight.

We're also introduced to a set of revolutionaries planning a coup d'etat to overthrow the ruling class. It would make sense, then, for those revolutionaries to team up with the robots and dismantle the class hierarchy. We could get a nice exploration of how class structures dehumanise the poor or some message about how, when society reduces humans to their utility, they're no more than robots. Okay, that's fine.

But then the revolutionaries also seem to hate the robots: they resent the way that robots have taken their jobs and opportunities. The coup d'etat goes ahead anyway, and a leader of the revolutionaries tells a robot that Human Lives Matter, and then he blows the head off the robot and the revolutionaries go and causes some havoc (before the coup d'etat fails off-screen).

The film itself doesn't treat robots any better, either. Despite trying to pull some heartstrings with cute robots cut down for no reason, the movie treats robots as effectively disposable whenever the audience deserves fome chaos. Of all of the on-screen deaths, some 80% are robots. We're treated to gratuitous scenes of robot gore—bolts and springs bouncing everywhere, oil leaking from burst eye sockets—but nary a drop of blood anywhere (except for Rock, just pre-death; he and Duke Red (the villains) both die offscreen).

The pacing

The movie is also cut and paced very strangely. We get a couple of weird Looney Tunes-esque scene transitions, where a black mask sort of closes in one one part of the frame—but I'm not too bothered by this, since it happens pretty rarely.

What bothers me more is the way that some scenes start. The endings are always generally right, ending on a poignant image or a significant line; but sometimes the scene starts in such a way that I thought I might have missed the actual beginning.

Within scenes, as well, we're treated to extremely sudden and graphic violence apropos of nothing—which violence then ends as abruptly as it began. Maybe there was a point to this: maybe we're meant to understand that this sort of violence is commonplace, that dwellers in Metropolis are inured to this sort of thing; a lot of these brief scenes of intense violence are also rife with passers-by who cry out in alarm but otherwise seem unfazed. In one scene, anti-robot violence is actually committed by passers-by; but at this point in the movie we're deep in the seamy underbelly of Metropolis so I guess this is meant to be forgiven. The robot is treated basically as a casualty of storytelling, and then the two characters that come upon the mangled wreck are treated to some exposition and then run away in search of more story, as quickly as they can.

The overall pacing is also a little weird. For example: from Kenichi and Tima meeting the revolutionaries, to planning the revolution, to the coup d'etat itself, to the quelling of the coup with the second coup, takes about 13 minutes. Whereas the whole scene in the Lego throne room is also about 13 minutes long, and covers significantly less ground, bogging down the film right before the climax.

This isn't the only instance of this sort of thing. Early on, we follow Bun, Kenichi, and Pero (the robot) through the layers of Metropolis for expository purposes, for five minutes or so. Then we cut away for story to move the plot along (the explosion in Doctor Laughton's lab) before cutting back to Bun and Pero for some more exposition (about the Malduks). It's not totally out of place—we need the background to understand the story—but I sort of wish that the movie showed us more instead of just telling.

Overall, though

I think it's a worthy watch in the genre of gritty-sci-fi-anime. I'd have liked it to make some commentary on the nature of power, or on the border between humanity and robotics—even if it was just rehashing Ghost in the Shell. I'd have liked to come away going, "Huh."

But as a romp through an ugly, grimy, but ultimately attractive world—and especially if you know what you're getting yourself into vis-a-vis the anime angle—it's a goodun.

Stray observations

• They make a point of telling us that robots aren't allowed to be called by human names, but then they introduce us to a class of robot called Albert II.
• Duke Red looks like Ocarina-of-Time-era Ganondorf.

Armageddon

Armageddon is exactly what it sounds like. It's directed by Michael Bay; a lot of things explode; nothing makes much sense. You get what you paid for.

Deep Impact

Deep Impact is worse because it takes itself so seriously, and it's bad.

There's all sorts of exposition posing as pseudo-scientific journalism running in the background. People barking statuses to each other on the spaceship. Close ups on various computer screens foretelling certain doom. One of the earliest search-engine montages--you know the kind. You can tell that every time a horn comes on, the James Horner is elbowing the director in the ribs, going, "Like Apollo 13, eh?" We get gratuitous shots of Ensure. Lots of teary-eyed hand-wringing from Morgan Freeman's president character, where he tells the whole country shit that the president would never tell the American people. Navel-gazing about looting, how the blazes continue since the firemen are all helping erect shelters or something. The movie takes itself so seriously.

I don't think I need to tell you that the movie is rife with non-science. Armageddon didn't play fast and loose with science so much as not play at all. I don't like movies like that, but it's Michael Bay & whatddya want.

But the movie goes to great lengths to show us how a character gets blinded by exposure to the sun, gives us a touching scene about how he's blind, and then in the next scene he's in the background with his eyeballs darting all over looking at things.

And none of the characters make any sense. Tea Leoni's character is unforgivingly mean to her father, for no reason, it seems. Vanessa Redgrave doesn't seem too bent out of shape about the divorce but Leoni is on a crusade against her ethnically-ambiguous father and his new wife, with whom he seems to have a pretty good relationship until she leaves him, for some reason, off-screen in the third act.

We get barely any character development for Elijah Wood, either; nor for his relationship with Leelee Sobieski. He gets on the bus, and then right before he goes in the bunker he changes his mind; and he goes back to find his neighbourhood looted, except for his neighbour's motorbike, which hasn't been looted?

And then in the very next scene, Tea Leoni's character also makes the exact same last-minute sacrifice, where she sort of looks off into the distance with her father's pictures in her hand as if she's forgiving him--for what, it's not clear.

The characters just do what the script needs them to. There's not a single real person in the whole movie. What makes Leelee Sobieski change her mind about going in the bunker after Elijah Wood comes back? She's already made it clear that she's not leaving her parents. UNLESS, of course: the script needs her to do it, because it wouldn't do for her to die. This is what I mean. The characters just move around and do what the script tells them to.

Lots of characters do this: say or do something, but they're lying, or they're one scene away from changing their mind to do the opposite, or we're led to believe one thing, our hearts are wrung, and then the movie goes, Just kidding! Leoni says she doesn't remember the pictures; then she says she does. Oren's wife doesn't make it to say goodbye; and then she does. The guy who discovers the comet drives off the road and the evidence is lost; but the government evidently learns about the comet anyway.

By the end of the movie I just didn't care anymore. The movie set us up for Tea Leoni to be our main character, and I was trying to get on board; but then they sidelined her in the second act so we could spend more time with the space guys, but then they sidelined them too, and we just sort of jumped around with people making dumb decisions and everything lost momentum. By the time the disaster happens it feels like we're just trying to get it out of the way so we can get to the scene of Morgan Freeman standing on the Capitol steps talking about hope and pretending that, what, half? of all Americans aren't dead.

Roll credits.

2/5

Stray observations

• The Russian guy didn't get to say goodbye to anyone! What gives?
• Why do we keep cutting back to New York during the disaster? None of our characters live in New York?
• Why is the spaceship, which was built in outer space, aerodynamic?
• There is a lot of exposition consisting of characters looking into the camera and just telling us about stuff.
• Can you imagine what would have happened in this pre-apocalyptic America had there been Facebook? Comet deniers anyone?
• There are actually a couple of cool shots. The shots from the inside of the space guys' helmets, where you hear them breathing, is pretty sporty. And the one where it lingers on the traffic with the comet streaming towards the coast overhead, with the 'Virginia Beaches / 6 miles' sign in shot: that's a nice shot too.

The film: seminal, instantly classic, containing some of the most memorable lines committed to celluloid in the twenty-first century. None of this needs to be said and yet: here I am.

Deeply, however, flawed.

The boys

This is only tangentially related to the rest of my complaints, but the men in this film are a massive drag. (Stanley Tucci excluded. His story, shoehorned in at the end, was heartbreaking. Tucci's acting was phenomenal. The way that he was used as a plot device and then cast aside: they did my man wrong.) Adrian Grenier's Nate was without exception whiny and self-obsessed. Simon Baker's character, who, I forget his name, was charming and a little oily, but then he pulled a sharp lefthand turn and sexually assaulted Andrea and then turned into a whole different character (which character only has like 3 lines). Which, okay, par for the course I guess.

The rest of the owl

Here's what the film is about: a young lady is trying to find her place in the professional world. She's hired at a fashion magazine: a job she does not respect. The lack of respect causes a couple of minor comedic trip-ups. Then we share a tender moment with the Tooch where we're shown how fashion is deeply meaningful to people. She grows to love her job. A series of further challeges display how she not only finds meaning in her job, but moreover how talented she is at it. The prospect of being fired terrifies her.

Her boyfriend, Nate (and set piece friends (including a babyfaced Harry Crane!)), however, doesn't (don't) share her enthusiasm. They willingly take her work gifts but then play keepaway with her phone. She misses Nate's birthday so Nate throws a moody (which, fair) and complains about she's changed—but refuses to have a grown-up conversation with her, opting for cheap shots instead. He doesn't want a professional girlfriend. Her friends claim that she's changed, because 'old Andrea' defined herself by her relationship to her boyfriend ("The Andy I know is madly in love with Nate.")

Some anonymous hijinx ensue. Over the course of a trip to Paris, Andrea has to face how committed she is to her job.

And then she fucking pulls a fucking 180 and decides she doesn't like her job and her whiny boyfriend was right all along, and in the meantime her boyfriend has found himself a serious job off in Boston, and just fucking drops it on her (after super rudely starting their first post-breakup meetup with, "My shift starts in 20 minutes", as in make it quick), and the has the gall to assume that she's going to move to Boston with him, and then guess what she just does a goofy smile and agrees to it?

Oh yeah, and then she gets a job with the New York City Mirror, so I guess she doesn't go to Boston after all??

????

The way that the movie loses its nerve in the last 10 minutes shatters me and I hate it.

The fix

Remove the men. Leave Harry Crane, because I like that guy; but make him Andrea's brother and give him the role of little angel on Andrea's shoulder, sort of keeping her grounded. The relationship between Andrea and Miranda Priestly provides way more than enough narrative fodder to pad out the film's 1h 45m runtime. Make it about the development of Andrea's professional self—we all know that Anne Hathaway can carry that sort of character-centric role. Balance the person that she was with the person that she seems so eager to become.

She can still screw over Emily Blunt and then feel awful about it. She can still leave and get the job at the New York City Mirror at the end. These are good story beats.

Just don't bring Adrian Grenier back into the movie with 4 minutes left and have Anne Hathaway swoon over him like he hasn't just been moping around in his boxers for the whole movie, like we're supposed to be on his side just because he's got those blue eyes and that devilish unkempt Harry Potter hair. Tired of it.