Good Astra

A review of AD ASTRA (2019)

Directed by James Gray
Written by James Gray and Ethan Gross
Cineamatography by Hoyte van Hoytema
Score by Max Richter and Lorne Balfe

Staring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, and Liv Tyler

I wish that I had seen Ad Astra in the theaters, because it might be my favorite film of 2019 (just barely knocking out another Brad Pitt picture). I also wish that more people had seen it, because not only it is exactly my sort of film, it's the sort of daring genre picture that cinema needs more of. It's a beautiful, well-made, well-acted, and, well, rad as hell. Ad Astra is a classic adventure story masquerading as an arthouse film. It’s Treasure Island as much as it is 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

It ultimately is a transfixing meditation on the failures of masculinity, the limits of obsession, and what you do with your life when you realize how much of your life has been working towards a lie. It also has some of the raddest splashes of action that I’ve seen since the last Brad Pitt movie I saw.

This is all to say: As Astra is a film that is extremely my shit. It's a genre movie that's pulled off with the weight and seriousness that it deserves. It is as much a technical achievement as it is one of good, old-fashioned storytelling. As far as projects that are directly aimed at me, it’s nice when that happens and it actually turns out to be a good movie.

It's also nice to be able to recommend this sort of film. It's nice when I don't have to have caveats or say it with some level of embarrassment. It's just a good film and it's a good film that adheres to my weird set of interests.

Then again, considering size of certain other space-based adventure films, maybe I’m just hungry for something else.

Maybe.

One of the big reasons that I love Ad Astra is that I’m a sucker for the NASA aesthetic. The helmets, the rovers, the jetpacks, the rockets, the color scheme—even zero G toilets! Ad Astra uses all of the wonderful iconography of NASA, but then pushes it further into the future, filling the movie full of the raddest speculative articles from Popular Mechanics. But, beyond having an incredibly good-looking and well-realized art direction, Ad Astra weaves all of those visuals and all of those ideas into a broader picture. It introduces ideas and visuals that expand the story, rather than show it off. It’s a neat little trick and, again, it’s nice to see that big, thrilling science fiction films don’t have to sacrifice story for spectacle.

Beyond the solid supporting cast (hello to Ruth Negga), we have the man: Brad fucking Pitt.

Pitt, at his best, has always played slightly unhinged characters. Men with affectations who maybe aren’t 100% trustworthy and who have very specific physical traits (teeth or hair or no shirt, etc). In Ad Astra he plays very much against type. Roy McBride is a calm, collected, and man who had purposely isolated himself from the world and compartmentalized his emotions. He’s a great astronaut who, like his father, fails at being a good man. It’s a quiet role and it’s one that requires more than just charisma to get through it. It’s a

Pitt is fantastic in this movie. He takes what could have very well been a boring role or one that could have been saved with some histrionics and instead crafts a real human being worthy of empathy.

So, yeah, Brad Pitt is great.

It’s also a lot of fun to see one of America’s most important male icons take on a movie about failure and emotional development. It’s an interesting flip on what most adventure movies are about and it’s made more interesting by the fact that Brad Pitt isn’t just an actor, he’s Brad freaking Pitt. The same goes for Tommy Lee Jones, one of America’s foremost (space) cowboy grandpas, play his wayward father. Again, maybe it’s just me, but in 2020, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more relevant message than “Watch this old man fail and ruin everything.”

Probably just me. . .

Ad Astra is a hell of a ride. While it does very specifically cater to my weird needs, it's still a spectacular-looking adventure story that manages to also be a powerful meditation on family, failure, and the future. Go check it out. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but this time I know it's true: Cinema needs more films like Ad Astra.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will see you next time, space cowboy. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Mark Watney of Mars

A Review of The Martian (2015)

by James Kislingbury

The past decade or so of Ridley Scott's career has not been the greatest. Since the early 2000's successes of Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, his output has been one long run of questionable films that range from the half-baked, the butchered, the confusing, and the downright awful. During this period, his technical skills only seemed to remind us that he once seemed capable of making good films. And then we remembered that his last unqualified good film came out around ten years ago.

The Martian, thankfully, defies this trend. It's the best movie Ridley Scott has turned out in a decade.  It's fun, it's light, and despite lacking the depth of his best works, it's an eminently watchable film. Considering the amount of calories I've wasted defending Kingdom of Heaven and Prometheus, this is exciting for me.

The Martian is about Dr. Mark Watney, hunk and space botanist, who is stranded on the red planet after a freak storm. From there, it's a series of duct-tape drama, self-surgery, and, back on Earth, an oddly gripping story that revolves around resource allocations (that and conversations about how people should just, like, try harder). It's more Robinson Crusoe than it is Enemy Mine, more Apollo 13 than it is, uh, Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

It's tackles the science fiction genre in a way that I don't think I've ever seen. Namely, it's a movie that is about actual science. Films in this niche have always dabbled with this sort of thing. Interstellar jumps most immediately to mind and 2001: A Space Odyssey jumps most unfairly to mind (as though anything should ever be compared to a Kubrick movie, for good or for bad). Those films only use the science a starting point for the drama. With The Martian, the science is the drama. It is the end all, be all of the film. It's a film without a villain, where doing long division is more important than bravery.

For the most part it works. Seeing a guy, step-by-step figure out how not to die is pretty intriguing. You know, that's cool. The problem comes from the fact that there's no real emotion in the film. It's a long line of problems that need to be solved and smart people doing bloodless math in their heads about how it gets solved. I mentioned it in my podcast, but later on, I thought of United 93 and the thrills Paul Greengrass manages to eek out of bureaucratic procedure and couldn't help but realize that I've seen it done better than it was in The Martian.

The Martian is a perfect title, because nobody in the film ever seems to act like a human being. People assemble into rooms, assess a problem, and then all go to their respective corners like no collection of human beings in charge of multi-billion dollar programs would ever do. It's a movie where Jessica Chastain is stoic. I don't know about you, but stoic is not why I show up to a Jessica Chastain picture.

The film seems more interested in maintaining momentum than it does in creating individual moments where characters can be confused or upset or indecisive. Human beings don't fit into alegebra, so the film moves right past them.

As lacking as the film is in emotion or any sort of attachment, it does have its moments here and there. You have Donald Glover taking the set of skills he honed in Community to be the most obvious quirky scientist this side of The Big Bang Theory (which, like JPL, is also in Pasadena). Then there's you have Sean Bean and Jeff Daniels dueling in a series of industrial offices over who can appear the most affably schlubby without tipping over into "I have a puppy in my van" territory. Most importantly, you have a montage set to David Bowie's "Starman," which is important if only because it is only the third most obvious David Bowie song about space and someone deserves credit for that coup. Then, after these moments, the story kind of slides back to its steady, unwavering tale about a dude trying to figure out how he can, oh boy, "science the shit" out of his space car.

Beyond the drama and beyond its technical achievements, The Martian deserves viewing, because it speaks to the importance of space exploration. Between the various disasters that have plagued our space program and the various earthbound horrors we've witnessed over the past decade or so, we've lost our ability to stare at the stars and wonder what could be. We've forgotten what they mean. The Martian steadfastly ignores this sort of cynicism. Like its drama, there's no place for it. Space travel is an incredible achievement. It is something that represents the best of our race. In this film it isn't some asshole's talking point about how we should spend that money feeding people in America instead of sending people to space (as though we have to choose). Going to space is, in a very real way, the best we can do as a species. If this film can put us right on the importance of space exploration, to get us wondering about what could be, then The Martian will have done its job.

Imperfect as it may be, The Martian is one of the smartest blockbusters to come out since, well, Interstellar. It is a film that, despite its failings, manages to strike a balance between hard science fiction and populist entertainment. It's, you know, pretty cool for the most part. As many better films of this sub-genre as there are, there are few that are as well produced as this one and even fewer that are as technically accomplished. The Martian is a respectable, enjoyable film that is also about as overflowing with human feelings as the planet it depicts.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and an Explorion.