James Gray
Ad Astra

The stupid brother of First Man. A mess that must have cost at least a hundred million dollars and is destined to be a big flop at the box office. Can Hollywood do worse? Yes, but here we're really scraping the bottom. An indigestible potpourri (I thought it was the heavy pizza I ate for dinner, then I realized it was actually the film that was putting me to sleep), which randomly mixes some tropes (not the dead ones from the pepper stew) from space works of recent years and beyond.

It mixes and ruins them, as per tradition for formulaic products. But let's take a step back. Before entering the theater, I told myself: let's hope it's not a step-by-step chronicle of this guy going to Neptune, I can't take any more space chronicles. It went exactly the opposite, it's a cheap odyssey with the stations of the cross being the Moon, Mars, the orbiting station, base x, and base y.

But to fill two hours, mental masturbation and checking the pulse every now and then isn't enough; something has to happen. So here are the pirates on the dark side of the Moon, with cars that look like they're made of Lego, the monkey that eats astronauts (really), the shootout on the spaceship, the super jumps between rocky fragments, shielding oneself with the hatch. Stuff that makes Armageddon and The Martian seem like auteur films. Not to mention Gravity and Interstellar. Everything good those films had to say is either forgotten or blatantly ignored here. The pathetic attempt to imitate the pensive and furrowed style of First Man, without having Chazelle's film's content. It’s space for space's sake, just to use that framework.

Everything seems to be holding a worthy ending, a twist. But it’s another stumble, a full load of supposed meanings (the son reaching the father at the edge of the solar system, to discover the truth behind that silence, the possible machinations of the SpaceCom, the cruel implications of humanity) reveals a void of topics. A convenient squaring, to make everything add up without excessive tears. A happy ending at all costs.

(spoiler) The only almost poetic touch is the stubbornness of a man who doesn’t want to surrender to the absence of alien life in explorable space. The endless waiting, the morbid exploration that cannot and does not want to face the absence of an additional beyond. It's a shame it makes no sense going all the way to Neptune to send these signals to supposed extraterrestrial civilizations, as a sci-fi enthusiast friend of mine who writes books explains to me. It brings to mind Zemeckis's splendid Contact (1997), with those magnificent radio telescopes.

The astronaut father confesses to the son that he never thought about him and his mother during the missions. A bitter touch, interesting but sterile in such a context. A too-weak cue to justify two hours of grand variety at a snail’s pace between planets and spacecrafts. And with sentimental fiddling, no less.