"Ad Astra": theatrical film with Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones

[daver]

The movie was abhorrent.  I've never left a movie theater feeling so dissatisfied.

[KelvinZero]

I went to see it anyway. Just to be ornery, I quite liked it.

Spoiler/
I would describe the plot as Gattaca meets Moby Dick

I think it helped to know that there was not a big SF pay-off. It was interesting trying to figure out what drove the guy. People here complained about the overdone drama in Apollo 13. This went the other way.
 The way it was acted was complimented nicely by the way it was filmed. I definitely had the impression of some sort of mild dissociative disorder that maybe appeared as a positive on all those automated tests. The robots thought he was almost as good as a robot. No danger sign there! 
/Spoiler

It would be nice to get past these spoilers and discuss how all the plot holes could have been fixed.. with science!

[Eric Hedman]

I went to see it anyway. Just to be ornery, I quite liked it.

Well that makes one of you.

[KelvinZero]

HUGE SPOILERS (obviously)
This youtube clip is a guy giving opinions on some of the technical errors, showing bits of scenes from the movie.



I like the point he makes at the end that so many of these plot holes could have been fixed they often didn't matter to the story at all.

One of the most blatant and straightforward was
Spoiler/
At the end he uses the nuclear blast to push his ship back home. Just don't do that. There was no requirement that he had any shortage of fuel, no big plot reason. Nothing. If you want tension then he still had to get to his ship and get to a minimum safe distance.

Also I think it would have been interesting to see an accurate simulation of what a nuclear blast would do to that local portion of a ring.
/Spoiler

[QuantumG]

I still haven't seen this stinker and there's a movie theater next to my hotel room. I guess you've all convinced me it isn't worth walking over.

If the average person is walking out the cinema with this "obvious" message then yeah, we're going to see the Space = Toxic Masculinity meme more often. Can't say I'm upset about that.

For me, too many people see spaceflight as a stage on which to make heroes.

[KelvinZero]

I still haven't seen this stinker and there's a movie theater next to my hotel room. I guess you've all convinced me it isn't worth walking over.

If the average person is walking out the cinema with this "obvious" message then yeah, we're going to see the Space = Toxic Masculinity meme more often. Can't say I'm upset about that.

For me, too many people see spaceflight as a stage on which to make heroes.

For what it is worth, I don't think it was about toxic masculinity ( and yeah I hate that term too ).
My argument is that the film only shows the "Self-reliance and emotional repression" aspect, none of the others. This guy was no misogynist, domestic abuser, bully or even braggard. The story would have worked exactly the same if the man and scientist father had been replaced with a woman and scientist mother.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity

Traditional stereotypes of men as socially dominant, along with related traits such as misogyny and homophobia, can be considered "toxic" due in part to their promotion of violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence.

Self-reliance and emotional repression are correlated with increased psychological problems in men such as depression, increased stress, and substance abuse. Toxic masculine traits are characteristic of the unspoken code of behavior among men in American prisons, where they exist in part as a response to the harsh conditions of prison life.

Other traditionally masculine traits such as devotion to work, pride in excelling at sports, and providing for one's family, are not considered to be "toxic".

The (story relevant to) character arc was basically this.
Spoiler/
The main character is a very competent astronaut. We are told that his heart beat never goes above 80bpm. He seems sort of disconnected emotionally. He always passes the automated psychology tests that are applied repeatedly throughout the movie.

He learns his father may still be alive He is sent on a sort of odyssey to the farthest edges of the solar system where his father is apparently engaged in some dangerous experiment that is threatening the solar system itself (some mcGuffin about antimatter and the search for life) . All sorts of chaos happens around him but it sort of feels like it is played on a movie screen at a distance. (realistic lack of sound in space helps with this)

His travels show a moon that is full of people. Mostly they show an airport lounge, commercialised mall feel. There are also people on mars.

The mission starts as official but gradually it becomes personal for him (though pretty much throughout he never admits this to himself. We learn how driven his father was on his mission to find life. We learn his father was somewhat of a monster, sacrificing everything including his crew to complete the mission.

He fails the psychology test but pushes on anyway, against orders. Like his father this also results in the death of the rest of the crew. (it is not really the same but the comparison is definitely there)

He alone makes it to the edge of the solarsystem to complete the mission. The location is the rings of Neptune. He finds his father, the monster, is a broken man. The mcGuffin experiment has somehow let his father see the entire universe and it is vast, beautiful and entirely empty but he has refused to accept this and just keeps repeating the same work over and over.

He convinces his father to take his hand but during a spacesuited trip back to the son's vessel, the father jets away and after a struggle, convinces the son to let him go.

Floating there alone, he sees the sun rise over Neptune's ring and has a sort of "pale blue dot epiphany" and an inferred great desire to rejoin humanity. With his new drive he overcomes various odds and returns home.

The story wasn't anti-space. For example I think he remains an astronaut but reconnects with his wife, people are still going about their lives on the moon and mars. It was the whole human world he was returning to, physically the small fraction of the inner solar system that actually had humanity in it, the only life anywhere in the universe, but metaphorically returning to humanity itself.

/Spoiler

I think there are two factors that stop people enjoying this movie.
* Like 2001 it was grindingly slow. This was sort of integral to the movie. I liked it but like 2001 some people never will.
* Despite a decent attempt, a string of unnecessary technical errors and also bad explanations that could have simply been omitted.

I think there is a really good movie within this movie. Cut away some stuff that doesn't make sense and was possibly added to introduce drama. Re-do some CGI with CGI that makes scientific sense. You could pretty much have inserted scenes from "Wanderers" because none of that stuff really mattered.

The "moon pirates" scene was a perfect example. I definitely would have kept it because it showed his mental state very well. The ONLY thing you needed to omit was any mention of "moon pirates." If the attack had been left mysterious then people's internal speculation would have come up with a far more obvious reason why they were attacked, and focused attention on the secret information that was revealed directly after.

[CameronD]

For me, too many people see spaceflight as a stage on which to make heroes.

..which is no different to the way people saw aviation 100 years ago.  Humanity has always needed heroes.

[john smith 19]

If the average person is walking out the cinema with this "obvious" message then yeah, we're going to see the Space = Toxic Masculinity meme more often. Can't say I'm upset about that.

For me, too many people see spaceflight as a stage on which to make heroes.

Indeed.

For space settlement to become a serious thing it's got to stop being a thing where every initial launch has a 50/50 chance of failure.

It's got to stop being this "alien" zone where humans venture briefly and scurry back home and space travel has to be something someone does as a way of going to work

It's the idea (expressed by both Elon Musk and Alan Bond in different ways) that for it to become an integral part of human society it must become "boring."  Something almost anyone could do in the way someone moves to a new city to take a job.

[Martin.cz]

Spoiler:

So I went for this movie only seeing the initial trailer, hearing something about it striving for realism & not doing any prior research. Still, I did not have very high hopes as realistic depictions of space are generally far between in mainstream fiction media (basically Expanse, maybe Gravity and not much else).

Already seeing staging taking happening in the trailer, not to mention the first stage being much smaller that the rest of the rocket, was kinda out of place to me for supposedly realistic depiction of pretty well settled near future Solar System.

On the other hand the scene in the trailer where a party with rovers gets hit by a meteor shower looked pretty realistic! :-) (Yeah, I have not noticed any pirates and it simply looked to me like their area was hit be a meteor shower or possibly some ship/station fragmenting due to the overall ongoing catastrophe and the debris hitting them down on the surface. Kinda like with the debris after Canterbury exploding in The Expanse.)

From the start things looked quite realistic, though I wonder what a "space anthenna" is good for (very low frequency signal detection ?) & how it holds in place to such height (dynamic structure alla space fountain ?).

Yet once the whole Lima project & the gamma ray burst (!) from Neptune stuff shows up, any striving for realism pretty much falls down to Earth, like debris from the space antenna. Just to enumerate the worst aspects:

- the Lima project uses antimatter for propulsion & apparently in big enough amount to somehow manipulate the magnetosphere of a gas giant to excite the bursts - the ludicrous amounts of energy needed to create any, let alone such ludicrous amount of antimatter simply does not match the technology & infrastructure of the setting
-> on the other hand, we at least don't hear about any material shortages or ecological issues like we were bombarded with in Interstellar, but still,
-> so much energy would imply giant swarms of space solar generators not to mention big orbital infrastructure which is suspiciously missing overall, with all the launches originating on the surface of a Planet or Moon
- the Lima project apparently aims to detect life by going out of the heliosphere, but that is way waay waaaay past Neptune where they actually end up
- the mission going for 16 years before things go wrong does not match its objective as well as the apparent ease of space travel in the setting
-> why do you actually have to send people to a listening post on the edge of the solar system ? can't you just relay the data to the inner Solar System, like we have been doing for ~40 years with the Voyager ?
-> couldn't they simply conduct a crew rotation or even possibly call hope for help/space taxi ? that way the crazy guy could continue to do his stuff without a bunch of dead bodies floating around ? it seems to take just 79 days (about half of ISS crew rotation!) with latest tech, so even older ships should be able to get there relatively quickly
- you need to go to Mars in person to speak to microphone directly connected to a laser link
-> one would think with multiple outright wars going on in space they would have secure communication channels they could send a recording through...

But hey, maybe it would switch to be so bad it is good - and the sight of a Norwegian space money of doom mauling an unfortunate astronaut in full EVA suit to death on a space station made me sure I was right! Indeed, just the depictions of physics and technology is so bad it is enjoyable with a morbid sense of amazement:

- the above mentioned primates of space doom
- joy ride through a lunar warzone without any kind of of armor protection or armament heavier than pistols, not to mention going all the way to the far side (nothing really prevents armored cars & tanks from operating on the moon...)
- the generally crazy approach speed every time any ship is attempting to land or dock
- climbing a ladder on a lunching rocket & hijacking said rocket!
- the ullage motors killing one of the Cepheus crew members with their burst of acceleration - apparently the booster & main engine generate no acceleration at all, but staging does!
- Cepheus storing cylinders of poisonous gas in the craw quarters that kill everyone once shot though
- Cepheus overall being a heck of a ship, rivaling many ships of the Expanse with is apparent limitless deltaV, trust-to-weight ratio (at least it seems to have radiators...) and re-entry/radiation shielding
- thrust vectors & vessel orientation all over the place most of the time
- nuking a ship full of antimatter - there is no kill like overkill!
- forgetting to tether your transfer pod to the Lima even though you visibly carry a tether on you - you could see the look in his eyes: "Oh, not again!"
- no explanation whatsoever how the bursts, antimatter & search for aliens on the Lima actually go together (this really stands out like it was cut out and replaced by all the introspective babbling instead)
- can totally agree with no intelligent life being present in the movies universe, including all the protagonists - that might indeed drive one insane!
- the whole spinning antenna & metal plate shield run thing - I was expecting the protagonist the use the plate as a surf board & ride the shock wave back to Earth, Dark Star style!
- the Earth landing CG was for one actually pretty nice and likely inspired by the Dragon V2 propulsive landing animation
- the landing location on Earth (arid area with a body of water) really reminded me of Planet of the Apes & another primate assault upon landing would not be unexpected by this point

OK, this got a bit long. I hope I have not bored to death anyone actually reading this far. ;-)

A spoiler free summary: The depiction of space travel and technology in Ad Astra is so abysmal this alone definitely makes it worth seeing as B/C movie to anyone with even little knowledge of realistic space travel. :-)

[ncb1397]

Hmm, using #E6E6E6 seems to be highly readable in half the posts because the forum software alternates the background color every other post. "#EBEFF3" is directly between each of those background colors. Should work better.

[mike robel]

One word....Boring

Much more boring than 2001 when I was in High School, except the killer baboons were much more ferocious than the 2001 hominids, but had not discovered tools.

[KelvinZero]

Hi guys, I started a new thread with SPOILER PALOOSA in the title so that we don't need to keep using spoiler tags.

I know lots of people hated the movie but I really like talking about flaws in HardSF, and problems that stop the film industry producing good hard SF. There is an interesting mix of totally trivial and unnecessary flaws, all the way up to some genuinely difficult problems of hardSF drama.

MASSIVE SPOILERS. No need to use the spoiler tag here.
(subtitled: why don't script writers just come here to get their science sorted out?)

[Cheapchips]

I'm sure part of the problem with this film's science is Pitt as producer.  When he was interview an astronaut on the ISS he asked about the Vikram lander, "Did you see it crash?"