Ad Astra *** Trailer***

[Kiimo]

I'm working on this trailer. Be advised this is a total arthouse movie. Think less "Gravity" and more "Solaris"

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Kiimosabi

I'm working on this trailer. Be advised this is a total arthouse movie. Think less "Gravity" and more "Solaris"

Kinda the vibe I got as well. Which made me think Pitt can't carry it.

[Sorry]

Originally Posted by Kiimosabi

I'm working on this trailer. Be advised this is a total arthouse movie. Think less "Gravity" and more "Solaris"

How do you get into that field of work?

[Kiimo]

Double majored in advertising and art history at KU. Moved to California and used nepotism to get a job. Highly recommend the strategy.

[keg in kc]

Reviews are starting to come out.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/re...review-1233364

while less is more for the actor, that's not necessarily the case for the movie, which tends toward the obvious and often feels adrift in a suspense-free void. Writer-director Gray's handsomely crafted planet-hopping drama is by turns vividly eventful and deliberate in its uneventfulness, and it feels caught, somewhat awkwardly, between stark simplicity and violent leaps into hyperdrive. Similarly, the voiceover track that threads Roy's thoughts through the action veer between the poetic and the psychotherapeutic — sometimes bitter and incisive ("We go to work, we do our jobs, and then it's over") and frequently unnecessary ("I've been trained to compartmentalize," he points out, as if we hadn't noticed).

Ad Astra has, at times, the meditative pace of sci-fi forebear Solaris, but certainly not the narrative complexity. Stripped down to the archetypal bones, the story revolves around straightforward father-son themes of love, veneration, abandonment, fear and longing: The missing astronaut Roy seeks is none other than his dad (Tommy Lee Jones), who happens to be the American space program's most-decorated hero.

As potent as that premise is, with its Marlow-Kurtz dynamic between the narrator son and the off-the-grid father he'd long presumed dead, it plays out in a way that makes it easier to admire than to be swept up by. Perhaps because Ad Astra's genre tropes, however striking, are also familiar — a distracting bit of Gravity here, the inevitable nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey there — this episodic saga feels gussied up by them, as opposed to fully inhabiting the terrain. Lurching from one Homeric ordeal to the next, the film can be stubbornly uninvolving.

https://variety.com/2019/film/review...es-1203317838/

At heart, it’s a short story set in space, decorated with major FX (the double rings of the evanescent blue Neptune are its most memorable image), held together by Pitt’s stalwart presence. This actor rarely makes a false move, and the fact he’s now having a moment — the well-deserved “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” Oscar buzz — could help “Ad Astra” at the box office. Yet what would help it more is if the movie had a genuine wow factor baked into its retro sci-fi aesthetic. I hope James Gray, as a director, continues to explore uncharted worlds, but even his cult of fans may find it hard to get too excited over a movie that, beneath its eye-candy space trappings, is this conventional.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/201...s-daddy-issues

(5-star review)

Gray (who also wrote the script alongside Ethan Gross) is an established purveyor of big, brooding, ambitious cinema, from The Yards through The Immigrant to 2017’s Amazonian adventure, The Lost City of Z. But he’s never made anything as ambitious as this soaring psychological space-opera, with its cool surfaces, dark pockets and sudden flashes of violence. Ad Astra is so deadly serious that it verges on the silly; so immaculately staged and sustained that it sweeps us up in its orbit.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/08/ad...ce-1202169692/

Despite a blockbuster-sized budget and whatever box office aspirations Disney might still have for this leftover piece of Fox’s pre-acquisition production slate, Gray’s largest film is light years removed from the crowd-pleasing likes of “Gravity” and “The Martian.”

This is spare and mythic storytelling; the more expansive its vision gets, the more inward-looking its focus becomes. Even with a linear narrative that never slows down, a chase sequence that feels like “Fury Road” on the moon, and a suspenseful vision of the galaxy that makes room for any number of unexpected surprises (beware the claw marks inside a seemingly abandoned spaceship), “Ad Astra” is still one of the most ruminative, withdrawn, and curiously optimistic space odysseys this side of “Solaris.” It’s also one of the best.

[keg in kc]

Well, the one constant in all the reviews I've seen so far is that Pitt is great in this. So maybe...

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by keg in kc

Well, the one constant in all the reviews I've seen so far is that Pitt is great in this. So maybe...

Boy, when you read something that boils down to "Solaris but less dynamic..."

Uhhh........that.....ain't good.

Solaris was one of the most tediously overwrought movies you will ever see. It is a movie that has become self aware and capable of smelling its own farts. And dull as dishwater.

If you take Solaris and somehow make it less interesting....egads, man.

This is gonna hit the ol' Netflix queue or I'll wait until it gets chopped to pieces and re-aired a million times on FXX.

[keg in kc]

[keg in kc]

I'd have to look it up to link it, and i'm not gonna, but I read a pretty lengthy av club review earlier that was effusive in its praise. Gave the flick an A-. So it ain't all bad, evidently, on the review front.


Edit: and checking RT it's sitting at 84% right now.

[Sorry]

I really like Brad Pitt and his vibe so I'ma support his film

[BWillie]

This looks so bad ass. Brad Pitt in sci fi...haven't seen him in a sci fi movie that I can remember?

[bowener]

Originally Posted by BWillie

This looks so bad ass. Brad Pitt in sci fi...haven't seen him in a sci fi movie that I can remember?

12 monkeys

[Barret]

Hey All just got out of this movie.

If you like Real Sci-fi then you will like this movie. Real Sci-fi has a message and this movie delivers on that. It is a slow burn though but it keeps you engaged throughout. If you go in expecting Aliens and a Shoot em up star wars type thing you will be disappointed.

Brad Pitt was really good in this and this will probably get him an award.

If you like reading Sci-fi and and see the message they get across and then it made you think, then I think you would really like this movie.

[Bump]

was almost interested until Brad Pitt said that the movie is about "toxic masculinity"

[Barret]

Originally Posted by Bump

was almost interested until Brad Pitt said that the movie is about "toxic masculinity"

This might be Pitt trying to not give the movie away but try to answer a reporters question

Spoilers for movie

Spoiler!

This movie is really about his relationship with his Father and how he is basically going down the same path his father did. There are many parallels that are shown throughout the movie as far as him not having a family and losing his wife/girlfriend, Putting the job before everything else, killing everyone on the ship. Once he meets his father he sees where he is going and how it affected his dad and sees that he didn't need to go to space to find the life he wanted, it was back home staring him in the face.

So that might explain the "Toxic Masculinity" that Pitt said concerning the main character.