Bob Aarhus

This is “Apocalypse Now” in space, except without Brando and Sheen and Hopper, but with exceedingly stupid science and Brad Pitt, who delivers the majority of his lines offscreen in a desperate attempt to bring relevance to the plot. The story itself makes little sense - we need to send this guy to Mars to read a message that apparently couldn’t be recorded on a thumb drive - and is weighed down with seemingly bolted on marital conflict and father abandonment issues which should be sufficient to keep our hero grounded but instead make him the prime candidate to keep Space Command’s reputation intact. An enigma wrapped in a riddle and slimed with radioactive waste, Ad Astra is being universally hailed as some sort of deep modern commentary by an audience that probably couldn’t pass a fifth grade science exam. The cinematography is gorgeous in a computer generated sort of way, and the action scenes are full of face eating and pew-pew but don’t contribute to our understanding of future dystopia (pirates on the dark side of the moon?). The acting is good from a few well-placed stars (and planets), but the popularity of this work defies logic.