Unusual Disclaimer: Before seeing this movie last night, I knew nothing about the movie. In fact, as I waited for the movie to start, they included a trailer of the movie like it was a soon-to-be released movie, but didn’t mention the movie’s name until the end of the trailer.
I give it 1 Star. I mention below, but I am fan of Tommy Lee Jones, and to a lesser degree, Donald Sutherland, and it pains me to give the movie that low a rating since they are both in it. However, I believe it only deserves 1 Star.
I didn’t factor this into my score, but if you are hearing impaired, the sound level is lower than most movies I have watched.
If I could sum up the movie in a few words –
- confusing,
- muddled,
- relationship – issues or not, depending on your take on the movie
- disconnected,
- disjointed scenes,
- trying to cram too much into a movie that wasn’t long enough,
- plot holes,
- Too Little Information (TLI)
It’s amazing how many people liked this movie based on the reviews posted on various sites. I am a fan of Tommy Lee Jones, but this is nowhere near his best work. I also like many of Donald Sutherland’s movies as well.
The space travel scenes were very good for the most part. It’s like they spent more time on getting great space travel scenes than they did about working on the plot, characters, and other things that audiences care about. I thought maybe it was me about the numerous problems with this movie, but my friend mentioned the same things after the movie. We often don’t agree on what we liked/didn’t like in a movie.
I gave up relying on professional movie reviewers because they, or their employers, tend to be sponsored by the various movie studios and have a BAD habit of overly positive reviews.
Sadly, this is often standard format for many movie studios – good or great special effects are more important than plot, developed characters, etc. I believe reviewers and if they work for a company that receives lot of money from movie studios for advertising, they need to reveal how much they are getting from each company at the beginning of the review. Same goes for private reviewers if they get free copies or free access.
I will try to avoid spoilers, but I won’t guarantee 100% success. I will keep anything I think might be a spoiler down the post a bit. I am including some links – Wikipedia, IMDB, some reviews, etc. I am not a fan of movies that do flashbacks the way this one did. Make it clear when it’s a flashback. In many cases, it was obviously a flashback, but in other cases, it was less clear.
FYI, the Kansas state motto is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Kansas “Ad Astra per Aspera” (Latin: “To the Stars through Difficulties”)
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Astra_(film)
Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ad_astra
Official website: https://www.foxmovies.com/movies/ad-astra
Metacritic: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/ad-astra
Ups Downs Family History 