We are going to "Ad Astra" tomorrow.

[Laffy Kat]

Has anyone here seen it? Opinions?

[tblue37]

1. A DUer posted a couple of days ago that it was boring. He/she said it was mostly

just closeups of Brad Pitt's face behind his helmet faceplate.

I don't know, since I've not seen it, though.

[qazplm135]

2. it's....ok

cinematography is great!

science is so-so. Some is good, some not so much. I won't spoil but the central premise of the movie has multiple bad science moments.

The acting is very good. The plot is...well, I had problems with it.

It's not horrible, but you don't come out thinking you've seen this grand story. It feels very small and insular. Again, not bad, and the imagery and acting do a lot to make the movie entertaining enough. But it's not a tour de force or anything in my opinion.

Then again, I have a high standard for these type of films.

[Laffy Kat]

5. Oh dear.

I will be seeing it with two physicists. I'm sure I'll hear all about the science errors, LOL.

[hunter]

10. Bad science breaks a lot of movies for me. So do car chases.

I was uncomfortably distracted by multiple incidents of improbably bad science in both The Martian and Gravity.

There's a lunar car chase in the Ad Astra trailer.

But the worst thing in today's science fiction movies and television is those tablet or holographic see-through computer monitors. What's the point of those things, other than that it's a cheap special effect? Nobody would use them in real life even if they existed.

Nevertheless I will probably see this movie with my wife. She is much more forgiving of these distractions.

Here's a fun YouTube video that contains major Ad Astra spoilers:

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

11. Without holographic coms

...how would Obi-Wan Kenobi have ever known he was our only hope?

[dawg day]

3. It's okay. Too much silence of space, too little human conversation.

I was surprised at how mediocre the plotting was. And Brad Pitt didn't impress me.

But it's pretty. And there was a great low-gravity moon rover chase.

[Laffy Kat]

7. I agree with your review 100%.

The moon chase was cool and Pitt is pretty, although there's way too much of him.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Let us know what you think.

I've seen previews and I know I'm not interested in seeing it.

But then I'm handicapped by knowing too much science.

[Laffy Kat]

8. Saw it. Meh.

I agree with Dawg's review above. One or two good scenes but it was too long and something of a slog to sit through.

[B Stieg]

6. Sounds like Cluney's snorer, Solaris...

But

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

9. Just saw it in IMAX

I'm a space buff, I have higher tolerance for a slow pace "in space" than most. I liked it.

Among the things I liked about it are:

The plausibility. It's an "are we alone out here?" movie, without aliens from an extra-solar world dropping by to conquer, study, educate, colonize, exterminate, or steal from us. Which to me reflects the reality of our part of this galaxy much more than alien-visitor movies do. I very much doubt living things travel between stars... at least, not between stars that aren't packed closely together. If we are EVER able to get a manned spacecraft up to, oh, 5% of light speed (and that's unlikely), we MIGHT send humans on a 100-year one-way trip to the star nearest to us. But I'm a doubter. (And wormholes are just theoretical. We have no indication they exist, and if they did, how would anyone control where they go?)

A permanently manned space station on Mars? Maybe, someday. But life there would be difficult, psychologically oppressive... and just really hard and grim once the novelty wore off. I felt Ad Astra got the overall tone of that pretty well.

Pirates preying on inhabitants on the moon? Um... okay.

Maybe we will achieve a lot of what's in Ad Astra. It will be no time real soon, but a couple hundred years from now, maybe?

I liked the depiction of any astronaut getting out on the far side of Neptune. That was pretty mind-bending right there, if one sort of grasps the challenges of space travel.

Ad Astra's overall question was, so where IS everybody else... the other intelligent life? And about how we damn well better appreciate and preserve our little habitat, Earth.

My own thoughts on extrasolar life is it is pretty common in the universe... but as one-celled life. And multicellular, but still far short of intelligent life. It's very possible that intelligent life might be very rare... that it took a tremendous amount of good luck for life on Earth to have lasted this long and especially for our species to have resulted from evolution. (Big brains burn a lot of fuel... notice the millions of successful species that have done quite well and lasted much longer than us without one.) There might well be no other intelligent life at all existing, presently (it might have arisen but already died), very close to us... "close" in interstellar terms.

Ad Astra is beautiful to watch, depicts plausible (in most ways) space exploration, and is thought-provoking, but is contemplative and not going to suit everyone's tastes.

I'm glad there are enough space travel movies made now, that we're able to have the diversity that allows for an Ad Astra.

[hunter]

12. I suspect the universe is full of life, even intelligent life.

Alas, there is no faster-than-light travel, no time travel, etc.. It's all against the rules. The quarantines in this universe are harshly enforced.

Successful intelligent species get bored with this universe and retreat into universe of their own making, or else they are perfectly content to stay at home and not draw attention to themselves.

A few may permeate the fabric of this universe beyond our awareness, but they are not guiding our evolution or any other similar nonsense. They are not gods. They are not Q dropping in occasionally to annoy Captain Picard.

The most unfortunate and unsuccessful intelligent species learn how to control nastiness like anti-matter or fossil fuels and destroy themselves.

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

13. If only 1 in 1000 planets with life develops intelligent, technology-using life...

or even if only 1 in 100,000 does, I acknowledge that that's still a lot of advanced intelligent life out there, even in "just" our galaxy alone. But it might also mean that the closest star with intelligent life orbiting it is the 1,000th nearest to us, not the 3rd or 10th or 15th nearest. Reducing greatly our chances of ever communicating with them, much less one life form ever actually encountering the other.

Which is a bummer. But the distances just defy living physical matter crossing them.

Towards the center of our or any galaxy the distances between stars become less and less. But interstellar turbulence also increases dramatically and the likelihood of life lasting very long before one's planet suffers life-extinguishing events becomes low.

I agree that less intelligent intelligent life probably frequently annihilates itself.

Whereas sufficiently intelligent life surely has no particular need to interact with us anyway. How much actual need do we have to talk to dolphins, or gorillas? Or ants?

And if very advanced life doesn't want us to detect them, then I expect we aren't going to be able to.

As for other-dimensional life... even if that exists we of course have no clue how to detect it.

l'm aware this sounds quite pessimistic. But in spite of it all I'm very hopeful about the James Webb telescope scheduled to go up I think next year. I believe it will offer reasonable prospects for finding biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

And a Mars lander in the pipeline should be able to search for microbes several feet down in that planet's soil... which is where they're likely to be if they exist on Mars.

These are the most exciting times ever, to date, in mankind's search for alien life.

[pressbox69]

14. A friend of mine

went to see it and said that it's horrid. I'll pass.

[SuprstitionAintthWay]

15. It presents a not-quick journey from the civilization of Earth to beyond the edge

of it past Neptune. And you see the fall-off of man's reach along the way, at the way-stations of settlements on the Moon and on Mars.

It takes its basic structure from Apocalypse Now. A brilliant man was sent on a mission years ago, beyond his employers' reach, and may have gone mad, abandoned the mission and taken up a rogue one, and may have murdered others in the process. Another man is sent after that one. The journey is long, occasionally eventful but more often not, and some unpleasant things are encountered along the way. The traveller, a stoic, increasingly gets troubled by his own thoughts. In Ad Astra the last and longest leg of Brad Pitt's journey, Mars to Neptune, he must make alone. On it he recalls his father, who is the man he is now going after.

Like I said, its not going to be to everybody's tastes. Apocalypse Now had unpleasantness, internal monologue, and tedium along the path to find Col. Kurtz in... Cambodia, was it? It in turn was based on Heart Of Darkness, and a journey into the heart of Africa in pursuit of Kurtz. I'm not saying Ad Astra is an Apocalypse Now or a Heart Of Darkness; it isn't. Just sharing information on why you might not, or might, want to see it.

What I draw from it, besides enjoying cgi space travel, is, okay, here's what our species has achieved. Significant accomplishments, but far, far from perfect. What is the other intelligent life in the universe doing? And, where the hell is it all, anyway? One aspect of my appreciation of the movie is these are questions that I too like pondering.

[Laffy Kat]

16. Thoughtful review.

Thanks for posting.

[Dagstead Bumwood]

17. Just got around to seeing it tonight.

I loved it. Absolutely loved it. It's deserves a larger audience than it's getting. The acting is solid, the direction and cinematography are superb, and it's central father/son dynamic rang true.

If you're a fan of serious movies and you don't need explosions or homicidal space monkeys (though, you'll get them!) to enjoy a movie, then I beseech you to check it out.