D

Within the first ten minutes of the movie, our great teacher, Hollywood, taught us that if you are on a plane and see two men in turbans nervous and sweating and praying, and it makes you uncomfortable, you're a racist. And the line was delivered by Sean Penn. Fitting. No thank you, you ignorant race baiting, stupid, naive, accusatory morons.

The script and acting weren't bad, like so many low budget movies. But as a Christian, I found some of the writing for the character of the pastor's wife to be not only stupid, but offensive. To me, or to any Christian, like a pastor's wife, for example, hell is not something to joke about--which she does in the movie at one spot near the beginning, "Pretty sure you'd go straight to hell for that--running down your preacher." Then the pastor tells her that he thought God spoke to him, and she reacted like someone who isn't sure they believe there is a God, and certainly has no relationship to him if she did believe it. "God spoke to you" [incredulous] "THE God?" Yea, the God, you know, the God of the Bible that it's our job to be ambassadors for? Again, this is supposed to be a pastor's wife. This is simply stupid and I turned it off after that.

This was not a 1970's James Bond romping fun adventure in space movie, which it seems like most viewers were hoping for. This was a subdued and serious movie with an outstanding theme and idea. Search to the end of the stars, travel to Mars, and what is humanity going to find? Answers from the aliens? There was action, make no mistake about it. But it had a realism to it that gave it a different feeling than Moonraker or Jason Bourne. The movie also took you a long, long way from start to finish. If I went to the theater to see it I might have wanted to see more stuff blow up, etc, to get the action fix. I despise the thoughtful, and thoughtfully boring and pointless artsy movies. But thinking back about Ad Astra, it was an excellent movie and I will be purchasing it when it's available.