Review of Ad Astra (2019) by Rose_Rd — 19 Sep 2019

Once again, I am shocked at the degree of corruption among movie reviewers - it's quite evident that these people are either extremely purchasable or hopelessly pretentious. Ad Astra is the worst space movie to come out in recent times. Terrible writing overall, with shallow, one-dimensional characters who are about as memorable as the cold rice porridge I had this morning. Brad Pitt spends most of the movie rambling to himself about his daddy issues, and it all comes off as terribly pretentious - I don't even know what theme they were trying to explore with this movie, but it just fails. I don't even remember the character's name, despite the movie being very focused on the character's relationship with his father.

The science in this movie is bad enough that it was impossible to suspend any disbelief. Like Mr. TorinHill said, I could not help but gasp due to the sheer mediocrity of the scene where the main character grabs a thin metal shield and just...floats through the rings of Neptune, which are depicted as being an asteroid field a la Star Wars, about maybe a few hundred meters thick. It's a goddamn travesty and all of it is rather pointless and stupid, and contrasts with this movie's failed attempts at portraying itself as a science fiction movie with gravitas. Light speed and other factors are also completely ignored.

There is no main plotline. Through the course of the movie, the focus is either on resolving a generic world-ending crisis caused by an ' electrical surge' caused by an antimatter leak in a spacecraft in Neptune, which is the worst excuse for a fictional existential threat that I've ever seen, due to the exposition being pathetically weak overall - nobody ever explains why the spacecraft ever had any anti-matter at all. The protagonist's father spends decades either travelling to Neptune or doing research there, nothing is ever made clear. What's evident is that the character can just zip over to Neptune in a few months, which makes the other plotline, involving investigating his father's disappearance over Neptune (a decade after the fact) weak and pointless. Someone would have done it already. Anyway, there is no coherent plotline to speak off. It all ends stupidly and without meaningful resolution.

Disgusting. Weakest performance by Brad Pitt in decades, as someone else said. I want two hours of my life back.

One point for the Moon and Neptune visuals.