In a roundabout way, the baboon thing established that Brad was a competent spaceship pilot. I think that was necessary for the rest of the plot. The moon pirate thing also established that he is handy with a gun. After those two scenes I think we are left with the sense that this is not just a scientist astronaut but a full fledged soldier with piloting chops.
Hmm, I thought those sequences were the interesting parts of the movie. Take those out and you really have a movie with no reason to see.
Yes, precisely. Take those out and the “hackneyed and lugubrious main plot” I referenced is almost all you have. That sounds like a much worse version of the movie. And it’s not that I can’t handle something that is slow and contemplative: I really liked the remake of “Solaris”, for instance. But this was no “Solaris”.
ETA: In fairness, there is one aspect of the main plot I think is really cool and interesting to contemplate:
The fact that they were just not finding any evidence of life elsewhere. Certainly there is Fermi’s paradox and the puzzlement over why we haven’t heard from intelligent life elsewhere when other star systems are much older than ours. I have a hunch that (if we’re not in a simulation) we came about through some real fluke that just isn’t as likely as Carl Sagan and others always assumed.
Tangent: Did they use a still from Space Cowboys for the young Tommy Lee Jones photo?
If that’s what you enjoy. Action without a narrative point just bores me, the longer they take to get on with it, the more tedious to me (the barrel-riding scene in one of the hobbit moves, for example, is what made me finally give up on Peter Jackson).
About the absence of alien life. At the end, when Brad first sees the bright blue light after his dad has gone, I thought for a minute that he was seeing something alien, and Dad had only just missed it. It wasn’t until he was surfing through Neptune’s ring that I realized what he’d been looking at was his own ship reflecting light.
I won’t speak for the person you were directly responding to, but I feel a bit indirectly strawmanned by this. I hate mindless action, and contemplative drama is great (one of my favorite films is “My Dinner with Andre”, which is literally just two people talking in a restaurant for the entire movie). But this movie’s quiet dramatic elements are just not strong enough to hang an entire production on.
I have seen my share of dramas that involve an angsty protagonist who goes on some kind of journey to confront an absent and problematic father. If you strip out the cool sci-fi worldbuilding, and just imagine this as a bare-bones stage production, it’s pretty weak.
Ah, but I’m living in a town with a LOT of interest in space and astronautics, you might say a center of excellence on the topic. So much so that there should be much more interest in a real space movie than a fluffy comic book movie.
The fact that I did not see a high interest level in this movie, here, was looming very large in my comparison. I should have qualified it.
2nd weekend results are in. $10M for a total of $35.5M. A 47% drop from last weekend to number 5. Not a terrible drop but it needed to be a whole lot better. So no magic legs.
So far $53.5M overseas. Outside of China, it’s not going to make all that much more.
It’s going to take quite a bit of streaming money to make this a plus. But it’s not a bomb-bomb either.
Not betting on a sequel. 
Respectfully disagree again. A lot of my favorite movies deal with distractions that happen along the main character’s journey that aren’t related to their narrative. If they “just got on with it” you wouldn’t have movies like Apocalypse Now or Children of Men.
Ok, so having read the thread (but not any of the links provided by various posters) what I’m getting is that someone had a story or maybe even a finished script laying around for some terrestrial adventure story, hell maybe even a sword and sail sort of thing, and looked at what seems to be the going thing in Hollywood right now and adapted it into a space adventure? Cause space is popular right now and yanno wut? It worked for Treasure Island/Planet and sort of worked for that one Noah’s ark story thing that ended with Planet Bob right? I’m asking because I’m debating next months movie budget with The Dorkling right now and this movie was on the list of possibles.
I think the most obvious comparison is with First Man because both are about how men can immerse themselves in masculine stoicism and occupational self-discipline to deal with terrible loss. But whereas that was communicated largely through Ryan Gosling’s performance in the former, Ad Astra is largely dependent on Pitt’s incessant voiceover. And while there are some great movies that use voiceover, it is also a more expedient (and one might say lazier) way of conveying your ideas in a medium that should always be More-Show-Less-Tell. I think this is also why people are comparing it to The Thin Red Line, but while that film genuinely wanted to wrestle with larger philosophical ideas, AA just uses it to hammer away at Pitt’s level of denial about his Daddy issues.
So for me, the film doesn’t feel slow because of the pace, but because nothing much really happens internally to Pitt’s psyche until the act in Neptune. Pitt’s a terrific actor (his recent stellar turn in Tarantino’s film shows he can provide layers of complexity without spelling things out) but he really isn’t given much to work with here. And can we finally abandon the conceit of a character “letting go” of their past by literally letting go of something? That ending felt just like the 3rd Indiana Jones movie, where the father has to give permission for the son to “let go”. groan
Of course, there was a great opportunity for a killer metaphor about how in space travel everyone is a research primate, but the film largely ignores that, as well as the opportunity to use two fantastic actresses on Mars: Ruth Negga and [redacted for cameo spoiler]. Why bother putting them there if they’re going to be wasted? There have been two really really interesting “hard” sci-fi films this year, the international High Life and Aniara–neither perfect but far more provocative and original than this well-intentioned effort that looks great but for me was an emotional fizzle.
Saw it today. I thought it was a decent hour-long movie. Unfortunately, in the theater I saw it in, someone must have slowed the projector down to half speed, because it took two hours to get through.
MM, I am drawing a blank on the cameo.
I appreciate your recommendations for hard sci-fi and I will check those out. Did you see the low budget but excellent Prospect from last year?
For High life, you’ve got to really power through the first fifteen minutes or so. Gratuitous shots of a shrieking baby pad the run time early on.
So any final totals on how much it made ?
Domestic 36 million. Worldwide 90.
Only 10 days after coming out, Ad Astra has already turned millions in profits. Wow. Unstoppable juggernaut. You might have to wait for second tier box offices in China and India, but you could probably even make millions with a Natalie Portman astronaut movie!
Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, all around great, but Brad Pitt flying to Mars in a spaceship and I’m distracted by thoughts like, “Wow, his ears are really tiny! Don’t noses and ears keep growing as you age? I need to look that up when I get home. How old is Pitt? 55? Is ear reduction surgery a thing? Holy crap then what about Tommy Lee Jones? His nose and ears are huge. Is he old enough to be Pitt’s father? How old is Al Gore?”
Not exactly gripping entertainment.
If you want to talk about bombs and how crucial advertising and owning critics is to the business of movies, I also saw Zeroville opening night in a 120 seat cinema with 119 empty seats. I stretched out and pretended I was an old timey Hollywood producer with my own screening room, it was amazing.
I also have no idea who you’re referring to here.
Natasha Lyonne was the intake staffer for new arrivals on Mars.
It’s up to $92 million but that is as of a week ago; it’ll clear $100 million pretty easily.
Whether that is a “bomb” depends on how you look at it. It will not lose money. I think, however, that it’s fair to say Fox was hoping for more from a sci-fi spectacular starring one of the most famous actors alive. In terms of opportunity cost, one could argue their production money would have been better spent elsewhere.