That still doesn’t make any sense; they could’ve just had him make the recordings on Earth and sent them to Mars in the equivalent of a flash drive. They only reason he would need to physically be on Mars would be to respond to his father’s response without the added time Earth-Mars time delay, but that clearly wasn’t Space Command’s intention. Hell unless voice synthesis technology hit’s a wall soon the only reason have him actually record messages would be so they’re personal enough to trigger a response from his father, but gave him a script to read.
well according to this confusing report it did make about half of its budget back so far … MSN
I believe the intended message of The Thin Red Line is that modern warfare isn’t personal. In my opinion, Malick was rebutting the common war movie myth about a small handful of men changing the tide of history. He was saying that individual heroics have no effect on the outcome of a battle, much less a war. Soldiers and sailors and airmen and officers and civilians are all just pieces in a vast war-making machine.
I’ll grant that this is a difficult message to convey; it’s hard to make a movie about how life isn’t like a movie.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. Also, 1/3 full for a matinee showing is a lot different from my going on Friday night of opening weekend and being literally one of four people in the theater.
Didn’t take long for it to turn political - some people think the movie performs poorly because it discusses toxic masculinity.
That would require a someone to know in advance that it, somehow, discusses “toxic masculinity” and to reject attending a screening because of it. How are people going to know that?
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Box office does not all go to the studio. Most for the first week or two does but after that the share drops off. (And given the B- CinemaScore, the studio is going to get even less down the road.) Also the total given includes overseas where the studio share is even less. It has not remotely made half its budget back yet.
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Budget only includes the cost of making the movie. It does not include ads, PR and other costs in rolling it out. This can be surprisingly large at times. I’ve seen examples of the ad budget equaling the movie budget! Ad Astra’s ad budget will be large, but hopefully not that large.
(The movie has been sitting on the shelf a bit too long. Supposedly due to the Disney/Fox deal. But they might have been worried about it regardless.)
The studios have various ways of recovering production costs. I read someplace that box office revenues are only a small part of overall film revenues (twenty percent on average from what I remember). In the case of this movie, even though it’s a space epic set in the future, there were a few present-day brands shown or mentioned so there were some product placement options.
The way those brands were shown was decidedly negative, so those companies were foolish if they paid much for that.
Word of mouth, which is crucial for the success of a movie.
I really think one would have to be overly sensitive about “toxic masculinity” if one got the idea that was a big part of the film. I really didn’t see that.
The main character, played by Brad Pitt, was unemotional and distant with his wife/girlfriend, which was why she left him at the beginning. At one point, we were told that he was famous because his heart rate never rose above 80bpm, no matter how stressful the situation. So the lack of emotion was perhaps part of that. And then when we met his father, we learned that he (the father) abandoned his wife and son to devote himself to his career, and the son was doing the same thing. Is that toxic masculinity?
I thought the action scenes destroyed the world and any claim this movie has to hard sci-if.
[spoiler]I just don’t buy the economics of moon piracy, particularly as it manifested in the film. I just don’t buy that, in the film’s universe, moon pirates can exist, be known to exist, and exist right outside of a US military space installation like it’s a FOB in Afghanistan (and they were definitely going for that as their real-world inspiration, the convoying and the whatnot) without being just pulverized.
Nothing about going to Mars made sense.
For that matter, thread no reason to go to Neptune either (for anyone, even TLJ’s character). Also, I’m pretty sure that if Neptune’s rings were really that dense with rocky debris, it would have long ago formed into a moon or moons.
And on and on…[/spoiler]
So, not “hard sci-fi” in my opinion, it only pretends to that. As far as soft sic-fi goes, it lacks the necessary excitement or drama. This was a movie that didn’t know whether it wanted to be:
- Gravity
- Interstellar
- Sunshine (surprised no one has mentioned that one yet)
- Total Recall
By failing to commit to either hard sci-fi or some kind of soft-core sci-fi action flick, the film exposed itself to criticism on all fronts. Too cerebral and slow paced for the action crowd, too many dumb science errors, nonsensical decisions by characters, and world-building irregularities for the hard sci-fi crowd (basically, bad writing).
Overall, I give it a 7/10. Which is… okay, but not the sort of film that I’d defend against critics.
On the size of the debris in Neptune’s rings: I watched a PBS special about the space probes that were sent to Saturn, and they said that although the rings are pretty thin in most places, there are spots where the chunks are as big as a mountain. And they turn out to be relatively new in cosmic terms, not having existed at the time of the dinosaurs—which means maybe they just need more time to reform into moons.
I get that hard-core sci fi fans would have some issues with the movie. Maybe that’s because it’s not so much a sci fi movie with a psychological element as that it’s a psychological movie that uses sci fi as a vehicle. I’d give it a B, maybe a B-. After I got home, I looked up the NYT review, and these excerpts sum it up for me:
I’d also give kudos to Tommy Lee Jones’ portrayal of the father.
I’m glad I went to see it. I’d recommend it to others–not as a great movie, but as a very good one.
I saw it a few days ago. Initially I thought it was pretty good but the (lack of) physics eventually left me shaking my head and I finished the movie disappointed. I think it’s a stretch to call it hard sci fi.
My biggest problems were at the end:
[spoiler]
- Brad Pitt character launching himself back to his spacecraft from the spinning antenna and getting it exactly right so that he collides with his target.
- Not getting slowed down significantly by the rings.
- Apparently not being subject to centrifugal force when standing on the spinning antenna.
- Using the explosion to propel his ship back to Earth (what was it that imparted a force to the ship? How did it not destroy the ship in the process?)
- Getting the aim exactly right so he makes it back to Earth.[/spoiler]
It would have been a much better movie if they had either left him out there or just not made it so difficult to get back.
I didn’t have a problem with him jetting around in his EVA suit, I caught a few glimpses of jets (of air?) coming from his backpack and assumed he had some kind of vectoring system.
My girlfriend took issue with the events on one of the spaceships that had sent out a mayday, but I found that reasonably plausible.
It seems reasonable for a research craft to have baboons and possible for them to escape and inevitable for them to get hungry.
I haven’t seen it, but my son – who’s a great fan of Interstellar (and Christopher Nolan in general) – has, and thought it was only so-so. With Interstellar, he went to great lengths to see it in its original film IMAX version, and then we both went to see it in digital laser IMAX at a more convenient location. I asked him if he wanted to go see Ad Astra with me, and he said no. So there’s another verdict. I guess I’ll eventually see it on TV.
If he gets a big boost in the direction he wants to go, he can use what fuel he has to adjust his course to make it go in the exact direction he wants (or more precisely, I suppose, to move in an arc that ends up where he wants to go).
I guess so. I’m not sure how the boost worked though. I can’t remember why he didn’t just have enough fuel to go back anyway.
I’m not sure about that either.
I still say whatever complaints you want to have about the physics, that aspect is better than you will find in the vast majority of movies. It’s the lugubrious and kind of hackneyed story that is more of a deficit, IMO.
I saw it last night with some friends. Overall, I liked it, but thought it was a bit padded at the beginning; I could have done without the moon pirates and the Norwegian mayday ship sequences so that we got Brad to Mars and into the rest of the story more quickly.
Yes, both those sequences could have been taken out of the movie, which leads me to wonder if they weren’t originally in the script, and then were inserted later for action and for the trailers. I still don’t get the economics of moon piracy against military convoys, but I do get that it was a thrilling action scene. The baboon thing at least helped establish a certain character as having (or lacking) a certain quality, though the value of knowing that is debatable.
I can imagine a draft of the script that was hard sci-fi with a lot of moments for quiet reflection against a backdrop of stunning visuals (with or without the deep-thoughts narration—for once the narration was fine IMHO), but that was then reviewed by a committee and had action set-pieces inserted, perhaps with some other tweaks to the script to alter what might have been perfectly sane/rational developments (like how McBride got on the spaceship leaving Mars, how he managed to get between ships, and how he managed to get home or if he ever did) and twisted them into their current, head-scratcher form.