01-20-2020, 04:13 AM
Ad Astra (2019)
'Ad Astra' reveals it's pretensions of being smart but playing it dumb approach before it even starts by translating the Latin title for the audience. It then opens on a breath-taking 'Gravity' style action-sequence, before settling back into the slow, dour, introspective mood that was clearly where the movie wanted to be. This does serve to grab the viewer's attention but also shows us how exciting this could've been. It continues in this vain for much of the rest of the runtime. 10-15-mins of introspection and then an artificially created action-scene to keep people awake, repeat, repeat. Early on, I noticed the similarities in style to 'Apocalypse Now' and once you have that in your head, the whole plot looks like a thinly veiled re-write of Francis Ford Coppola's film. Every one on the production is doing great work so it's a shame it's in aid of a half-baked script. I reckon one more critical pass to remove 'Smart characters doing and saying stupid things' could've nailed it. When a minor character suddenly dies in what is intended to be a shocking way, I spontaneously burst out laughing because it was caused by such idiotic and unbelievable behavior (quickly followed by more ridiculous decisions and fatalities).
I got the impression that a lot of doubles (human and digital) were used because it often weirdly looked like the actors faces were floating in the helmets. Also lines were clearly added when actors were faced away from the camera. Afterwards I read that "Following poor initial test screenings, reshoots were conducted (although Pitt was unavailable)" which makes sense. Those dodgy looking helmet shots were in those annoying out-of-place action scenes, which could have easily been created in the computer without much involvement from the actors. If 'Ad Astra' had stuck to it's guns, not bothered with trying to be exciting and just gone all out on the lonely bleakness of space it could've been something pretty special. It's innovative vision of near future, near earth, space fairing, felt intriguingly different from other movies.
I'd be tempted to do a fanedit of this one.
'Ad Astra' reveals it's pretensions of being smart but playing it dumb approach before it even starts by translating the Latin title for the audience. It then opens on a breath-taking 'Gravity' style action-sequence, before settling back into the slow, dour, introspective mood that was clearly where the movie wanted to be. This does serve to grab the viewer's attention but also shows us how exciting this could've been. It continues in this vain for much of the rest of the runtime. 10-15-mins of introspection and then an artificially created action-scene to keep people awake, repeat, repeat. Early on, I noticed the similarities in style to 'Apocalypse Now' and once you have that in your head, the whole plot looks like a thinly veiled re-write of Francis Ford Coppola's film. Every one on the production is doing great work so it's a shame it's in aid of a half-baked script. I reckon one more critical pass to remove 'Smart characters doing and saying stupid things' could've nailed it. When a minor character suddenly dies in what is intended to be a shocking way, I spontaneously burst out laughing because it was caused by such idiotic and unbelievable behavior (quickly followed by more ridiculous decisions and fatalities).
I got the impression that a lot of doubles (human and digital) were used because it often weirdly looked like the actors faces were floating in the helmets. Also lines were clearly added when actors were faced away from the camera. Afterwards I read that "Following poor initial test screenings, reshoots were conducted (although Pitt was unavailable)" which makes sense. Those dodgy looking helmet shots were in those annoying out-of-place action scenes, which could have easily been created in the computer without much involvement from the actors. If 'Ad Astra' had stuck to it's guns, not bothered with trying to be exciting and just gone all out on the lonely bleakness of space it could've been something pretty special. It's innovative vision of near future, near earth, space fairing, felt intriguingly different from other movies.
I'd be tempted to do a fanedit of this one.
![[+]](https://forums.fanedit.org/images/focus/collapse_collapsed.png)