Review of Ad Astra (2019) by Primalprime — 28 Mar 2020

I honestly can't see what so many other did in this film. I hear terms like "thematic depth" and "nuanced performance" tossed around in the countless 10/10 reviews this film has gotten, but no one cares to elaborate on these features, seemingly confident that the film speaks for itself. For me it didn't.

Brad Pitt's performance felt more wooden than nuanced, though I'm not sure how much of that is his fault given how frustratingly vague the script is. The movie is drenched in sci-fi clichés and tropes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems that every chance it has to play with these tropes is thrown away in favour of playing by them, letting them drive the plot and character development. The result is a movie that feels like it has little of its own to say. Lines of the script unashamedly foreshadow, to the point of spoiling, the single moment they will be relevant later. Design tropes are used to help us identify characters, even when it would have been more thematically appropriate to play with our expectations a bit. Major questions are left unanswered and predictable beats are played like dramatic twists. From start to finish, this movie failed to impress.

That's not to say there was nothing the movie did well. The shots were well put-together and beautiful, though much like the character design they sometimes seemed to work against the themes they were meant to support. Based on my admittedly cursory knowledge of space physics, nothing seemed egregiously wrong, though many characters seemed so stupid and helpless I questioned how they became astronauts in the first place. The designs of vehicles, buildings and technology were possibly the most well thought out and believable parts of the movie, so you may find some value there, but as I mentioned earlier this is often tempered by how they seem to confuse what the movie is apparently using them to say.

Lots of close-ups of Brad Pitt's face, though. If that's what you're looking for, then 10/10.