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Ad Astra (2019)
Worst SF movie of the decade
...at least among major ones, I'm sure there's some cheap schlock somewhere which is worse. But I'm astounded that anyone likes this one, or that three major actors signed up.
I. Science.
1) What the hell were those "space antennas" at the beginning? They are never explained, yet obviously a major and expensive project. 2) Why go to the Moon, let alone the far side, if your ultimate destination is Mars? It's more energy-efficient to go straight from LEO orbit to Mars. 3) Why land on one side of the Moon, at a major base there, and take off again from the opposite side? Again, waste of energy. And if you are going to the other side of the moon, it would be far faster, safer, and again more energy efficient to take a short rocket hop than a trio of ground rovers. 4) A ship heading to Mars in 19 days--hence at extraordinary speed--cannot just "stop" and rendezvous with another spaceship going in any other direction. In fact, "stopping" doesn't mean anything in this context, period. 5) Why go to Mars just to send a radio transmission? You can do that easily from Earth. 6) A radio transmission from Mars to Neptune would take around a half day to get a reply, not 5 minutes. 7) If you go all the way to Neptune, why park just on the opposite side of the rings from your final destination, making the final leg unnecessarily difficult? Actually, if the ships are on opposite sides of the rings, then their complete orbits must cross through the rings, with ensuing damage twice each orbit. 8) Why use an atom bomb to destroy the other ship, when all you need to do is blow up the antimatter containment vessel? The antimatter will then react with anything nearby and destroy whatever is left. 9) A little push from a spinning radar boom would not be enough to push an astronaut through the rings, let alone accurately; nor is a nuclear explosion going to propel your ship back to earth, let alone accurately. 10) No explanation of how a teeny tiny ship around Neptune could be creating "power surges" which dramatically affect Mars and Earth. Antimatter doesn't begin to account for that. 11) The only explanation for why the Lima project is in the outer solar system was to make observations "outside the heliosphere." But Neptune is nowhere near the edge of the heliosphere.
II. Plot.
1) Donald Sutherland's character Pruitt doesn't do anything important. Yeah, he gives Roy a secret he wasn't supposed to, but not enough information for him to really know what to do. 2) There's no explanation of how they know the father is still alive, or is likely to be responsive to a message from his son but not from the rest of earth space command pleading with him to stop the power surges. 3) Actually, our protagonist Roy (Pitt) doesn't do anything either; his father doesn't respond to the message as far as we know, and the crew which Roy killed (accidentally, to be sure, but after taking a grave and needless risk) would have done *exactly* what he ended up doing if he had stayed put. 4) Nor does his father Clifford (Jones) do anything, well, again, other than kill a bunch of people, and gather information on alien planets which an unmanned probe could easily have done, information which shows them to have no life...so his search failed. In short, no one in the movie does anything good or important. Roy doesn't even save his father, or meaningfully reconnect with him; Clifford first agrees to come back to Earth with Roy, but apparently insincerely as he tries to kill them both in space--why, as there surely were many ways he could have laid a trap and killed them both on board his ship? And why do that, if you want your data on alien planets to be collected and preserved? 5) Why lunar pirates at all? But if you have lunar pirates protecting or stealing from each others' mines, why in the hell would a team of them go after a trio of lunar rovers? Do they think they'd be carrying gold or something? 6) The space baboons were just dumb, period. But on top of that, it makes no sense for the hero on a special secret mission to explore the derelict craft and put himself in unnecessary danger. And how the hell did they break a space helmet? Those things are tougher than baboon teeth I think. And why would a spaceship have the double mission of biological research on space baboons and exploring an asteroid? You could do the former in LEO, combining the two makes no sense. 7) A bunch of hints go nowhere. Half-way through I thought they just might salvage this wreck by revealing that what we are seeing isn't what is happening; the increasing coincidental parallels between father and son's lives, the virtual reality on the walls in Roy's Martian room, the suggestion that Clifford might have contacted alien life, all hinted at some weird twist, possibly making the journey into some mental test, a replaying of the father's journey, or something even stranger. Spoiler: no such luck. No aliens come along to explain all the unexplained and unexplainable science goofs and plot devices. 8) We are never even told if Clifford got let alone replied to Roy's message; the secretive CIA-types act like he did and are keeping this a secret, but we never get the slightest hint of why, either from them or from Clifford, so this is all just a red herring with no purpose except to make Roy suspicious of the other operatives. In fact, the enormous secrecy and mistrust they have for Roy obviously backfires on them because it incentivizes him to sneak on board the ship to Neptune, resulting in many pointless deaths.
I am disgusted by comparisons between this movie and 2001 or Solaris; Ad Astra doesn't deserve to lick the bootheels of such great works. Some directors are producing fine SF these days; Gravity and The Martian, while they each have some scientific errors in their premises, are still miles ahead of this one. This movie tries simultaneously to be an action-adventure, a moving family drama, and a contemplative spiritual mediation. But it fails utterly in all of these aspirations.
Laugh-In: Guest Starring Don Rickles (1969)
Best joke wall scene
I usually don't care for the closing "joke wall" scene, as the two-liners tend to have a pretty low level of humor. But on this episode Joanne Worley quickly mis-reads one of her lines (not sure if it was said wrong, or out of order, or the other person's line, or what), and realizes this just as she finishing saying it so you hear her trailing off into self-deprecating uncertainty as she starts grabbing, tossing, and trying to read directly from the pink sheets which their jokes are apparently written on (we've never seen these before in the show, so this is a rare behind-the-scenes peek). Arte gives an off-the-cuff reply, then tries to get her back on track, but they quickly give up. Some of the other jokes then go as planned, but others are also apparently misread. Joanne and Goldie Hawn both find the flub-up so amusing they can't correctly say many of their assigned lines, and collapse into laughter, especially during an exchange between Dan and Goldie, where she eventually says the right line, but for a long time multiplies the humor by giggling incessantly at her inability to say her line while a flood of pink sheets--perhaps dropped by actors standing above her--fall past her. Don Rickles clearly reads some of his jokes as written on a theme of "I first heard that joke back when..." but he too starts riffing off the general chaos, and soon it's impossible to tell which lines are pre-written and which ones are ad-libbed in response to the general disarray of the pink sheets flying every which way. It's absolutely the funniest joke wall scene in the series so far, and ends with everyone opening their doors and clapping--perhaps at each other, perhaps at Dan & Dick's commendable effort to hold things together in the middle of the pandemonium.
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
So much potential lost in CGI and mangled details
Problems: 1) the Aunt Beast episode was missing, 2) the list of Earth's warriors against the darkness was given by the Ms's, not by the children (encouraged by the Ms's), 3) the list omitted any spiritual warriors, which in L'Engle's book begins with Jesus, 4) IT as a giant brain is missing, but instead is simply referred to as a kind of off-scene mind-controlling entity, 5) all we see of Camazotz is the ball-bouncing scene.
(1) is important in teaching the viewers, and Meg, that not all good things, and our allies against evil, are externally beautiful on first sight. Also, from there Meg travels by herself back to Camazotz to rescue Charles Wallace, but in the film she is left there by mistake. This fact, along with (2), is important because it's part of her maturation, her learning that the truth, and the ability to fight darkness, is already inside her, inside all of us; but in the film the list of warriors is just part of a lesson from the Ms's. In the book, the Ms's are more Socratic, maieutic, guiding us to recognize truths we already know in another form. This is briefly referenced in the film in a kind of flashback Meg or the children together have when being told about the darkness, and they recognize it in many little petty events in their lives (bullies, adults with conflicts), so the film doesn't get this completely wrong, but is not consistent about the point. (3) is important to the author's vision. I very much sympathize with the intention to make the story more ecumenical, and indeed if I were writing the list it might not include Jesus, or not put him first. But it's not my list, it's L'Engle's, and we should respect that. (4) makes IT too abstract, when the power of the book is to make evil, the darkness, the thing, visible in a variety of weird yet concrete forms, while always reminding us that it, and the fight against it, takes many other concrete forms which we must learn to recognize. (5) similarly makes Camazotz too abstract, and less of a real planet. The ball-bouncing is preceded in the film by a ridiculous scene of tornadoes threatening the children (in the book the danger is not physical but mental/spiritual); and it is followed by an (illusory/dreamlike?) scene on a beach which doesn't capture Camazotz's austerity at all.
IMO, the 2003 TV-film version was thematically better; it added a longish illusion/dream sequence at the end which was not in the book, but which stayed closer to the book's messages/themes than the changes in the new one.