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Movies Sci-Fi Space Entertainment Science

What 'Ad Astra' and Brad Pitt Get Wrong About Space Travel, Science and Life In the Cosmos (nbcnews.com) 89

Posted by BeauHD from the failed-mission dept.
Freshly Exhumed writes: Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and consultant on numerous movie scripts, was excited to watch "Ad Astra," the new Brad Pitt space thriller. The film was promoted with the promise of scientific realism in depicting a solar system well on its way to being settled by humanity. Unfortunately, Professor Frank finds that despite very good intentions, "Ad Astra" strikes the wrong balance between story and fact, art and artifice. While the plot ventures out to the farthest planet Neptune, the demands of the film's theme cramp its science fiction imagination. Instead of letting us explore a vision of our common future in space, "Ad Astra" delivers a solar system stripped down to fit a very particular story.
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What 'Ad Astra' and Brad Pitt Get Wrong About Space Travel, Science and Life In the Cosmos More

What 'Ad Astra' and Brad Pitt Get Wrong About Space Travel, Science and Life In the Cosmos

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  • And the award goes to ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @05:16AM (#59233132)

    Ad Astra for best trailer and marketing to make people think they're going to see something they're not.

    The film was well made, from a technical and performance standpoint, but -- without giving any spoilers -- contained many sequences, characters and points that had nothing to do with the actual fucking plot, but added momentary excitement and/or interest. Absent those, the story was pretty dull and formulaic. As noted in TFA, the "science" is off and/or simply wrong. The Expanse does the science of space travel much better, and by that I also mean more accurately -- obviously ignoring the Protomolecule stuff -- and The Martian (book over film) had better science and music, even if you hate Disco.

    I could easily detail a dozen things that annoyed me in Ad Astra as either wrong, unnecessary, dumb, pointless or impractical, but that would involve spoilers. All that aside, the CGI is well done and the acting is good -- and manly ('cause that was, apparently, important to the filmmakers, for some reason). Still, *my* heartbeat never went above 80 (okay, one spoiler) ...

    My advice is wait until it comes out on Amazon/Netflix.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 )

      Ad Astra for best trailer and marketing to make people think they're going to see something they're not.

      And one more thing they got wrong... the fucking name.

      "Ad Astra" is Latin for "To the Stars". The character(s) traveled from the Earth to the Moon, to Mars, to Neptune and back to Earth -- none of which are fucking stars. The film should have been named, "Ad Planetarum".

      • Even further nitpicking (Score:5, Funny)

        by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @07:14AM (#59233348) Homepage

        The film should have been named, "Ad Planetarum".

        Ad takes accusative, not genetive.

        So "ad planetas [wiktionary.org]".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        To be fair, "ad" is more like "towards" and "astra" means pretty points of light in the sky rather than hot balls of fusing gas.

        Many air forces use ad astra as a slogan even though they're not going to any stars (or planets). But they are going up.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mmutka ( 5495542 )
        By that logic, "astronauts" should be called "planetnauts". But since the furthest man has gone is the Moon, we don't have any of those yet either, just lunanauts and orbitnauts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iCEBaLM ( 34905 )

      They tried to make a modern 2001: A Space Odyssey, but forgot that 50 years ago when that movie was made it was groundbreaking. Now it's just boring.

      The guy beside me fell asleep in the theatre. I would have gotten more entertainment watching paint dry.

      • Re:And the award goes to ... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Sique ( 173459 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @08:26AM (#59233526) Homepage
        There actually is a Paint drying [imdb.com] movie. 10 hrs of excitement!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        An excellent demonstration of the shortening attention span epidemic.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ranton ( 36917 )

          An excellent demonstration of the shortening attention span epidemic.

          I wasn't alive at the time, but 2001: A Space Odyssey was not that well received in 1968. Reviews either called it a masterpiece, or boring and dumb. Not that much different to what people think about Ad Astra. Over time 2001: A Space Odyssey became more universally thought of as a movie making masterpiece, but mostly because of its cinematography and special effects although not as a good piece of storytelling. Considering how much the industry has progressed in the last 50 years you need more than good ci

      • 2001: A Space Odyssey is a boring, meandering, and senseless piece of overrated shit.

        Skip the entire fucking ape scene, keep the next hour or so of the movie, then write an actual ending and get back to me. No, it's not that I "don't get it", it's that there's nothing to "get". It's not deep or meaningful, it's just inane bullshit, as is typical when someone tries for a grand story and realizes they can't figure out how to end it.

    • "My advice is wait until it comes out on Amazon/Netflix."

      Is that the current equivalent of "wait until it comes on CityTV" in the wee hours of the morning timeslot? Will it be another one of these movies that is so bad they could no even give away a single advertisement, so the movie runs commercial free?

      Not knocking CityTV -- their selection of wee hours spaghetti westerns designed for watching under the influence of mind altering substances was superb!

    • Re:And the award goes to ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @10:09AM (#59233886) Homepage Journal

      Action scenes that don't move the plot forward seem to be a huge problem for recent Hollywood movies. It's like the director realizes he's making a boring movie and rather than fixing that he decides to distract the audience.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      It really was amazing marketing, and is exactly the type of movie where film critics will lead standard movie goers astray. The rotten tomato score is 83% for this movie, but the audience score is 43%. Sometimes that happens because of some SJW backlash, but in this case it was just a boring movie. This is common for Oscar bait movies and it is usually pretty obvious. But this time I was hoping it was because the movie was too cerebral or hard-core sci-fi for standard audiences, although that certainly wasn

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @05:40AM (#59233172)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • "As long as it is not a documentary, reality will take a second place. ALWAYS."

      It seems you haven't heard of hard science fiction.

      There's a reason the best science fiction authors have a hardcore science background.

      • It seems you haven't heard of hard science fiction.

        In the case of Ad Astra, it seems like it was hard to get the science into the fiction.

        The TFA notes:

        Making the main character an astronaut simply allows the interplanetary void to become a metaphor for that isolation, and the dark tone of this son-searches-for-father story infects its portrayal of the science.

        With that in mind, they could have set the film in Wyoming, but then it would have been "fiction" not "science fiction".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ranton ( 36917 )

          With that in mind, they could have set the film in Wyoming, but then it would have been "fiction" not "science fiction".

          The only real gripe I have about the movie is some marketing and reviews made it appear to be "hard science fiction", but the movie ended up just being a drama set in space. Which is okay, plenty of people like those movies, but I was certainly tricked into seeing it by that false narrative.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:More than 100 years we make movies ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:30AM (#59233254) Journal

      ... and people are still surprised they are not documentaries.

      Not exactly. But a story should be consistent. For example, the film "Alien" was pretty consistent. You could imagine a species to specialize in surviving and thriving on spaceships, and it would something like the film: an egg stadium to overcome centuries of waiting for a victim, and a quick, violent living phase. The early James Bond movies were pretty consistent as well, but later on they showed a helicopter tilted on its nose to cut its victims. That is so plain rubbish, that the story just stops there.

      We don't want a story to be a documentary, but when you are dragged into the story, you should not be thrown out by utter nonsense. And in science fiction you can do a lot to prevent nonsense.

      • from TFA itself:

        Before I go any further, let me state that I am not one of those scientists who demands that science fiction get all the science right. My job on âoeDoctor Strangeâ was not to ground the heroâ(TM)s magic in some obscure theorem of quantum physics. Instead, it was to help the writers build a consistent universe for the film that used their fictional version of science consistently.
        The point of good science fiction is always good story telling. Itâ(TM)s about using ideas in

      • ... and people are still surprised they are not documentaries.

        Not exactly. But a story should be consistent.

        Agree fully, and had a hard time to choose either to up-vote or to add a comment.

        For me personally a story cannot trump the logic and consistency of the created world (a scenery) - I would even add that this is the essence of the SciFi genre. Not sure if it's a modern trend or just more popular recently to just make a collage of pretty pictures without consistency, that's why I cannot stand J.J.A. m

        • The problem is that hundreds of thousands of people have spent hundreds of years hammering out most of the kinks in our scientific knowledge. Nobody has spent hundreds of years hammering out the kinks in their fantasy story or movie script. Tens of thousands of people don't get to preview them and give feedback before the final draft. We're never going to get real-world consistency in our art because we're never going to spend the time and manpower to rake through it over and over until it's totally clean.

          W

          • A great comment, thanks, just would add that I appreciate when an author tries to make a consistent world play for him and doesn't ignore his own rules just because he/she doesn't care.

            Han shot first.

            Indeed, he did.
            And I will hand a glove to whomever claims otherwise ;-)

      • The early James Bond movies were pretty consistent as well

        I know. I hate that helicopter scene. Personally I prefer James Bond floating around a space station firing lasers, pew! pew! Back in the 70s. James Bond got soooo unrealistic in late 90s.

    • False dichotomy. It's not a choice between "100% accurate" or "accuracy doesn't matter at all".

      Nobody is expecting a movie to be 100% accurate, but titles that bill themselves as scientifically accurate or adjacent to that should score closer to 100% accurate than to 0% accurate. In any case, the pointing out of inaccuracies by using critical thought is something to welcome, not to argue against.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      The thing is that they want to tell a story...

      Except that they didn't even do that.

      I kept waiting for something to happen to the main character that would make him particularly likable or identifiable, but throughout the entire movie, there was nothing. I found that the movie failed to depict any sort of conclusion that made any of the terrible and practically unforgivable things which preceded it worthwhile. At the end of the movie, all I was left with was a feeling of "why did I watch that? I cou

  • Some Space Nutter doesn't think a movie depicting SETTLING THE SOLAR SYSTEM isn't realistic??? I guess this guy really wanted the job as consultant on the movie and was turned down.

    • And worse, a movie that seems to have given the story priority over appeasing space nutters over what the future likely will never be.

  • From the TFA, he goes on about how thinks the style of spacesuits might be different in the future than what is depicted in the movie. Same for the vehicles. That's not a scientific critique. He guesses the acceleration might not be depicted correctly, but then admits it might be right. And he guesses the magnitude of the antimatter effect might or might not be accurate. If you want to critique something, how about the obviously excessive gravity on the moon and mars, but oddly he doesn't mention that. Anyw

  • The "Science" of Ad Adstra (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, ad astra, you can not surf a nuclear fission/fusion reaction ...
    ... to propel a spaceship ...
    ... 2.9 billion miles ...
    ... in a desired direction (ie, to Earth) ...
    ... without incinerating the spaceship ...
    ... or completely irradiating its occupant ...
    That is all you need to know about the "science" of Ad Astra.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Haven't seen the movie, but nuclear explosion-driven rockets were seriously examined in the late 50s early 60s as a way of achieving both high thrust and high specific impulse rocket propulsion.

      The idea came from the physicist Stanislaw Ulam, who with Edward Tellar came up with the basic design of thermonuclear weapons, and one of the chief figures in the project was Freeman Dyson. Given the immense quantities of energy involved, the spacecraft could be extremely massive compared to chemical rocket powere

      • There's a big difference in the Orion project ideas and the concept of just taking a normal ship (looks a bit like a capsule that might go to the moon), pointing it towards Earth, detonating a single nuke next to it, and having it fly all the way back to Earth from Neptune. Or from outside of the heliopause. The movie thinks those are the same thing for some reason.

  • Whether or not to go ... or to wait for it to be on free-to-air. Hmm. I'll check out what seat prices are this year, see if it's worth the effort.
  • would have been a good movie during the 2001 and Moonraker decade.
    If your making a space movie, consider the politics and "space" part ... vs more of the interesting in "space" ending of Ad Astra.
    The fathers work, what he found, what he did. The why of the father..
    The malfunctioning antimatter power source?
    Don't add so much about:
    The son doing his day job, getting to the moon, pirates on the moon... that was vital movie time wasted.
    A movie that needs a part 2?
  • Pluto is a planet.

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