Ad Astra: Voyage to nowhere

Ad Astra (2019) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rated PG-13, for violence, brief dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.20.19

Put the ballots away; the contest for 2019’s worst big-budget Hollywood production has concluded.

Doesn’t matter what emerges between now and Dec. 31; nothing will be poorer than Ad Astra.

Having reached the Mars outpost, Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is warned by Helen
Lantos (Ruth Negga), superintendent of the American sector, that his military superiors
have been less than candid with him.

This portentous, deadly dull and hopelessly self-indulgent train wreck is the most outrageously overblown sci-fi misfire since 2000’s Battlefield Earth. And that’s woeful company to keep.

Ad Astra is what happens when directors get too full of themselves. History is littered with similar studio miscalculations: Michael Cimino, and Heaven’s Gate; Steven Spielberg, and 1941; Warren Beatty, and Ishtar; Barry Levinson, and Toys. Mega-budget stinkers, every one of them.

James Gray — who co-scripted with Ethan Gross — and star/co-producer Brad Pitt have topped them all.

As I’ve observed before, when science-fiction goes bad, it goes very bad.

Rarely have 122 minutes passed with such agonizing sluggishness. This is the film for folks who thought 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t slow enough.

It’s also the film to watch, for those who can’t get enough of Pitt. You’ll never again see so many tight close-ups and relentlessly slow takes on his face; cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema lingers on every dimple, blemish and wrinkle with the adoration of a reverential acolyte.

Nor is it a happy face. Ever. Pitt spends the entire film in mostly silent remorse and (supposedly) thoughtful brooding. His line deliveries are quiet, flat and emotionless: completely in contrast to his character’s hilariously overblown off-camera narration, where each sentence is separated by pauses so pregnant they could deliver. You’d think Gray and Gross believed their text had been lifted from Moses’ stone tablets.

I despise preachy, pompous science fiction. It’s the first refuge of so-called storytellers who believe that a futuristic setting is the only way they can impart Wisdom Relevant To Our Contemporary Lives. The result is invariably condescending and insufferably patronizing.

Beyond all that — aside from the relentless pomposity — Gray and Gross fail on the most primary level: They don’t tell a good story. The journey isn’t interesting, and the “resolution” leaves far too many key questions and issues unresolved … after which, we get a bewildering epilog that feels as though it has been yanked in from some other film.

Robot & Frank: Unconventional buddy saga

Robot & Frank (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, and rather needlessly, for brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.7.12

Science fiction isn’t solely devoted to opulent spaceship battles and grim post-apocalyptic survival sagas, despite Hollywood’s best efforts to suggest as much.

At first, Frank (Frank Langella) can't stand having to share his home
with a mechanical "nurse" that monitors what times he gets up each
morning, in addition to dozens of other intrusive edicts. But Frank's
new companion has other, far more intriguing talents ... and
friendships have been built on much less.

Some of our best cinema sci-fi has been much quieter and more deeply moving: gentle parables that employ only modest futuristic touches in order to confront universal truths — often uncomfortable ones — about the human condition.

These days, as aging baby boomers contemplate the frightening implications of mental and/or physical deterioration, we’re seeing a corresponding focus on gerontology issues. Science fiction has responded in kind.

Robot & Frank is a whimsical, charming and poignant character study: a film school short expanded into a full-length feature that enchanted this year’s Sundance Film Festival audience and went home with the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize. The tone of Christopher D. Ford’s original script — his first big-screen effort — feels very much like that of a Ray Bradbury story: thoughtful, occasionally poetic and willing to tackle unsettling topics.

But this slice of elder life is disarmingly cloaked in the trappings of a mild-mannered comedy, and the story’s more serious elements sneak up on us. Director Jake Schreier, also making an impressive feature film debut, paces the narrative quite skillfully; he also draws persuasive performances from his cast members, most notably star Frank Langella.

The result, at times, feels like an intimate stage play. The action is confined mostly to two locations, with a resulting, subtle sense of claustrophobia that echoes our main character’s confusion over the way memory loss is shrinking his world.

The setting is “the near future” in the upstate New York community of Cold Spring. Frank (Langella) lives alone in an increasingly cluttered home that is nestled in the woods, a comfortable walk from town. Frank’s grown children, Hunter (James Marsden) and Madison (Liv Tyler), have grown worried about his apparent inability to care for himself; his fading memory also plays tricks on him, such as an ongoing desire to dine at a long-absent local restaurant.

He’s also a kleptomaniac, occasionally pocketing trinkets from a gift shop and then squirreling them away in his home wall safe.