September 29, 2019

Work.

I worked a good share of the day today, even though it’s Sunday. Sometimes you gotta do what ya gotta do. I have goals. This is how we reach them. By working.

Ad Astra.

My second car was a 1976 Pontiac Astre. That’s the first thing I think of when I hear the title of the recently released Brad Pitt “space” vehicle, “Ad Astra”.

Theatre 14 of the local Arclight Cinemas was nearly full when we saw “Ad Astra” on Friday night. I knew little about that movie outside of “it’s Brad Pitt! In space!” and that his character’s father was somehow part of the plot. I’m game for any movie that takes places in space so off we went to see Ad Astra.

I don’t feel like it was a waste of money but I walked away from the experience a bit non-plussed. Spoilers below, hit the plus sign for more, but don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Spoilers!

I don’t intend on revealing the whole plot but I felt like this movie was put together by committee. It was like they said, “Ok, Brad Pitt’s character has to see his Dad on Neptune” and they dutifully built a movie around that. Extra emphasis was put on the visuals (which are very impressive) but not a lot of time was spent on dialog. I found the dialog thin. The committee then reconvened and said, “Wow, this looks great, but it is such a boring movie”!

So they add Space Pirates. Pew pew, buggies bumping off each other on the Moon, more pew pew and then we never see the Space Pirates again.

“OK, that helped, what else ya got?”

So on the way to Mars they run into another space ship sending out a distress signal. Everyone is dead and floating in zero-G. Then there’s a bunch of gorillas that are cranky because they’ve been left out in space. And then we don’t care.

My husband proclaimed “It sucked!” as the credits rolled and I was sitting in the dark processing what I had just experienced. I wasn’t moved. I thought it looked good and it was good for what it was. But I did check my watch a couple of times.

I don’t do ratings for movies but if I did, this one wouldn’t make the Merit Roll.