(dir. James Gray)

Here’s the serious “Acadamy Awards”-facing version of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017), a “daddy issues in space” movie about how “being the greatest” means you’ve probably also succeeded at being the worst, with Chris Pratt prestige-upgraded into Brad Pitt, and Kurt Russell prestige-upgraded into Tommy Lee Jones, who plays daddy.

This time around, Brad Pitt has to get from earth all the way to Neptune to deal with daddy, who is doing some bullshit out there that’s causing a planetary catastrophe back home. (Brad’s the only man for the job, etc. etc.) The structure of the journey is very fun – a sort of space-planes/space-trains/space-automobiles where Brad Pitt has to get from earth ➡️the moon ➡️Mars ➡️Neptune, with a lot of inexplicable, weird little adventure asides and details sprinkled in at the first three stops. But you might as well turn it off once Brad gets back off Mars, where the interesting space stuff (and the movie’s internal sense of “space movie plausibility”) abruptly ends, and it settles into wack Hollywood theater about fathers and sons. It would be stone cold simple to write a better, completely standalone movie about just this movie’s concepts for Mars, the moon, or commercial space travel, which is deeply frustrating, because it means this movie has a load of good ideas that are left unexpanded in favor of a big cornball act three.

When I talk about Ad Astra I get so riled because of how close it got to being incredible without getting past being normal, which means I’m inevitably gonna end up rewatching it. As a coda here I’ll add that I’m due to rewatch Interstellar (2014) – curious to see whether I still feel that that movie is the high water mark for 2010s “serious space movies” or if I’ve just been saying so for long enough now that I convinced myself.