Ad Astra - Sep 21

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. So, let us talk about something different for a change – the 2019 movie ‘Ad Astra’. Warning, we are going to be talking about this movie at length, so today’s article will have plenty of spoilers! …Starring Brad Pitt and a fine-supporting cast, AA is… depressing as Hell, and makes some smart strategies by focusing on either close-up shots of the manly profile of Mr. Pitt, the amazing eyelashes of Ms. Negga, (which is one of the main reasons I went to watch AA, I admit), the hirsute face of Mr. Jones and son – or it making wide, far-sweeping, panoramic shots of space. Consequently, it manages to avoid the fact that its’ plot is rather sinewy and sickly, metaphorically speaking – and where to begin?

First, with the range of emotions – there really is not any. Mr. Pitt’s McBride-son, since he is the main character of AA – period, it is all about him and his father, (played by Mr. Tommy Lee Jones, again), everyone else are just passers-by in his life. No wonder that his wife, (played by Ms. Taylor),  has left him within the movie framework and is barely there from the script’s P.O.V. – she’s superfluous, you can replace her, say, by Ms. Negga’s character and the plot off AA will barely be affected. In an age of political correctness, this sort of male-centrism sounds kind of politically obtuse, but because it’s a space opera, no one seems to give a damn, plus September 2019 has given us ‘Hustlers’, so everyone might also be distracted by them too.

Back to emotions – there really are not any. None of the main characters display any. Between AoS and ‘Preacher’, as an example, we know that Ruth Negga can be very emotional, with a great range of facial features – but here we do not see any. To Tommy Lee Jones’ credit, he makes his McBride-father character sound like a major egotistical asshat without displaying any emotions: he may be completely deranged, in a captain-Ahab-like manner, but his face? About as emotionless as his son’s.

Moreover, this applies to the minor characters too. Finn’s Stroud, Ortiz’s Rivas and Hamilton’s Vogel appear only in one scene at the beginning, and this is it, yet they are have blank, featureless, emotionless faces that the rest of the cast also has. Mr. Donald Sutherland tries to make his character – Pruitt – to be more impressive, the heretic, but the good colonel is written out of the story by the end of the first third of the movie. That much for him.

…Actually, the good colonel’s character, (as in ‘movie character’ suffers another flaw): there is no back-story for him. When Mr. Sutherland first appears on screen, the audience may be distracted somewhat by his attempts to give colonel Pruitt some facial expressions, (and he succeeds, landing firmly in the ‘deranged owl’ territory of faces), but not enough not to miss that Pruitt and McBride-son have history together. Indeed, as the movie progresses, we learn that Pruitt and McBride-father have worked on the Lima project together, and there was a falling-out, and things ended badly between them. This is just a step in the process to make McBride-son realize that either something has went very badly and very wrong for his father, or his father isn’t the man that McBride-son always thought that he was – and that thought has driven McBride-son hard enough into making him into the man that he became by the beginning of the film.

However! None of the audience knows this, not immediately, and even after they do, all they see is a complete stranger, approaching Pitt’s McBride-son’s character and immediately hitting it off as the old friends that they supposedly are. In actuality, all that Sutherland’s Pruitt-character does is to give some cryptic info about McBride-father to McBride-son, as well as a memory stick with more cryptic info. And then he gets seriously shot and wounded by the space pirates on the Moon and was written out of the story.

Right. The space pirates. They were the random monster of the Moon arc. Because McBride-father had been a semi-deranged sociopath with a complete disregard for his fellow man, including his family and himself, but was presented to everyone as a dashing explorer and hero, things have to be very hush-hush for McBride-son to get to Neptune and retrieve him…only not. McBride-son had been lied to, and the military top brass decided that it was important for him not to know it, and that laid the seeds for the Martian portion of the movie, and its’ conflict.

Pause. On Mars, this is where the human b-story of the movie – McBride-son is going through the Solar System to discover the truth about his father, while various human factors try to help and hinder him – are the strongest. There, he gets some proof that his father is alive, but the military is cutting him out, because he has done his part and can be removed. Ruth Negga’s character – Helen Lantos – helps him get onto the rocket that goes after his father all the same… and it can be noted that while Helen Lantos is as bland and emotionless as McBride-son is, Ruth Negga is a good enough actress that you can almost see some of her Raina character fro, AoS shining through, as Lantos treats McBride-son not unlike how Raina treated Grant Ward at the final episodes of AoS S1 – but we’re not going there.

Instead, we are going off to Neptune. The remaining crew of that space ship, Cepheus, were actually government’s assassins, sent to off McBride-father, (and probably the son too), now that colonel Pruitt is out of commission and can no longer handle any McBrides. However, secondly, they are the most incompetent assassins, McBride-son is able to kill them despite his best intentions, which is sad, and firstly, there had been the Norwegian biostation in space. It sent out a mayday signal, and the then-captain of Cepheus decided to go there. There was a conflict with McBride-son, who wanted to get to Mars ASAP to continue to his quest for his father, but the then-captain of Cepheus channeled his inner child and told McBride-son very pointedly that this was his ship, so he’s the one who decides what their actions will be, so McBride can either tell them what’s the big rush to Mars is all about, or he can take over Cepheus and make all the choices himself. On one hand, this makes no sense – the crew of Cepheus were apparently in on the secret op – to find and destroy McBride-father, on the other, it is pointless: McBride was never the one to shirk responsibility, as the opening scenes of the movie showed: he put on a spacesuit and went forth to fix the robotic arm on the space station that he was upon, even though it wasn’t really his job, so the entire scene of getting McBride-son and the then-captain onto Cepheus is just painful.

But then they got onto the biostation and its’ monkeys. Monkeys come in all shapes, sizes and species, so some dumb-ass decided to use some of Earth’s biggest monkeys in an enclosed environment – drills. At 70 cm long, and weighing-in at about 50 kg, drills and their closest relatives the mandrills, are some of the largest primates there is, second only to the great apes in stature, but unlike them, and like their more distant baboon relatives, these monkeys are armed with powerful jaws and long sharp teeth – and have tempers to match.

…No, drills and mandrills are not baboons, though they are usually confused with them, ever since TLK-94, where Rafiki – a mandrill – not only had a baboon-like tail, but also ID’s himself as a baboon, (seriously, look it up on that video. It is right when he meets the grown-up Simba for the first time). AA’s drills also have them, as do the mandrills featured in the second Jumanji movie reboot. In real life, they only have short tails, not really noticeable in all that fur.

Back to AA and its’ space opera. As it was said already, some idiot decided to manage some of Earth’s biggest and strongest monkeys in an enclosed space, even though monkeys are very good at escaping their enclosures…which is why in real life, baboons, drills & mandrills aren’t really used in labs; instead, it is their macaque cousins, (such as the rhesus macaque), that are used there. Those primates aren’t as big and strong as the baboons, drills & mandrills are, and their teeth aren’t as big and sharp, but they can have ugly tempers, especially the sexual mature males – but where’s the blood? Aside from some scratches on the walls, (and monkeys don’t have claws, unlike big cats or bears, someone has really dropped the ball on their zoology there), there’s no blood or corpses, except for the first captain of Cepheus, who ran into the escaped monkeys on the space biostation and got his face ripped off for his trouble, because, yes, drills and mandrills are big enough and strong enough to do that – see above. So, why there aren’t more corpses?

Because either this was some sort of a trap for McBride after the moon pirate ambush failed, or it is a plot oversight. I am leaning towards the latter, but, still, common sense? You are going into space in an enclosed, closed, and self-sustaining space station, from which you cannot readily escape – and you are taking some of Earth’s biggest, strongest, and meanest monkeys with you. Obviously, there were some people alive long enough to send-out the mayday signal received by Cepheus, so something went even wronger after that – and it was the plot of AA.

Where were we? Oh yes, en route from Mars to Neptune. Some reviewers have hinted pre-release of AA that there is going to be a twist in the plot. After all the plot twists in MCU’s AoS, I was skeptical about this development, and I was right. The plot twist, apparently, was Space-Com’s turning onto the McBride family, as presented by three-slash-four of the most incompetent assassins that I have ever seen in movies and/or TV series. Some people point out that in this manner Roy’s journey mirrors his father’s – both men leave a trail of corpses in their wake even though they don’t intentionally mean to – but the way, for example, that Roy kills the assassins is really pitiful and annoying. Sometimes, McBride-son is more than competent enough to survive a crash alongside the crashing space station, to space-surf through the rings of Neptune, or to use the nuclear explosion of his father’s Lima project to jump-start his own journey home upon his now-battered space ship. However, when it comes to dealing with his father…

Now, let us not deny: McBride-father, Clifford, is a grade-a asshat, who abandoned his family, (namely, Roy and Roy’s mother, Clifford’s wife), in pursuit of his dream, of finding extraterrestrial life. He failed. In the world of AA, produced, co-written and directed by James Grey, there is no life on other planets, humanity is alone. Frankly, it makes the world of AA very depressing…which may be what Mr. Grey was planning all along, but we digress. The point is that Roy is smart enough, and competent enough, to do the above-mentioned feats of epic awesomeness and daring-do, yet he wasn’t smart enough to realize that his father might need some sort of meds, or to be subdued in some manner, or something, before they are going back home? Yes, Clifford is crazy enough, (or sane enough?) to play along until they are actually in space, after which he begins to fight his son tooth and claw, ready to kill both of them until Roy submits and cuts Clifford lose and off into the space he goes, where he has lived and killed and now will die. This very depressing, but is also a metaphor – Clifford is an albatross on Roy’s neck that needs to be cut loose for Roy to become a fully-rounded grown-up and get over his trauma of neglect. Sophocles’ king Oedipus rolls his eyes and gives Roy a Shirley Temple – lad, we have all been there, and you sure that your missus isn’t (kind of) reminiscent of your late mum? Sometime between concluding the Martian plot arc and starting the – Neptunian one, the movie’s script have done a complete turnaround, and rather than making the McBride-father a proper character, they reduced him to a plot device instead. Roy came to Neptune to prevent his (former?) superiors from killing his father and blowing up the Lima experiment – and he did just that on both counts. As far as plot twists go, this one ranks right there among the worst ones of MCU, for example, and we still have not hit upon one more very important plot hole.

Uranus. No, not ‘your anus’, be still my splitting sides, ha-ha, but Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, the one right there in the middle between Saturn and Neptune. Named after a figure in Greek mythology, the grandfather of Zeus and Hera, Uranus has the third largest planetary radius and the fourth largest planetary mass in the Solar System – a very notable planet, put otherwise. AA mentions it zero times and it is not shown at all in the entire movie, even though AA shows us some clear-cut shots of Jupiter and Saturn, never mind Neptune, which is the backdrop for the movie’s final act. What gives? It is a planet, so political correctness cannot be blamed for this one, (it may meddle with all sorts of aspects of Western life, but astronomy? Not so much), so I’m guessing that Mr. James Gray, who was making AA into the movie that was completely Sad and Solemn and Serious just couldn’t endure the thought that people in the audience will have involuntary chuckles when they hear the word ‘Uranus’ and promptly refused to have anything with the movie until the offending name, and the offending planet, were removed from the script, period. Consequently, ‘Ad Astra’ takes place in some alternate universe, where Earth is a part of Solar System that has no Uranus either because it never been in the first place, (yes, the formation of the Solar System and etc. during the Big Bang as we know it was touch and go during that initial time period), or because humans have blown it up somehow. And before you say that it’s impossible for our race slash species to blow up an entire planet I can only say that a) we haven’t invented the right way to do it yet, and b) we haven’t tried yet either, intentionally or otherwise. That said, if in the world of AA humanity did manage to blow up Uranus to a point where not even space/ice dust was left of it, (in real life, Uranus, just as Neptune, is an ice giant, whereas Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants, and Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore according to some sources), you would think that at some point of the movie this would’ve come up, because, hey, it’s an entire planet!.. Anything else?

No, that is it, actually. AA is a movie that has no humor, very little normal social interactions, is intentionally depressing as f- Hell, and sometimes unintentionally bizarre. Characters have no back story, they come and go in the great epic that is life and times of Roy McBride, just as they did in an equally great epic that was the life and times of Clifford McBride, an insane murderous fanatic and sociopath, (but hey! Product placement of NatGeo magazines! Money talks, baby!), so by cutting his father loose, literally and metaphorically, Roy now gets the chance to be his own man – a surprisingly small and simple message for such a pretentious movie.

…This is it for now, see you all soon!