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Sunday, December 15, 2019

Films for Planes Review: Ad Astra

Ad Adstra ☀️☀️

I like space movies, generally speaking, so when I was having my dinner on a recent Emirates flight I decided to watch Ad Adstra, starring Brad Pitt. It was very boring, but I watched to the end because I thought that something interesting might happy and because I like Tommy Lee Jones. In the end, as one of my female colleagues put it, it was just “Pitt porn” and I probably wasn’t the target market. But even Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t save it.

I’ve no idea what Donald Sutherland was doing in this tripe.

The story, about Brad being sent to find his father who has gone a bit Kutrz round the back of Nepture, was almost completely uninteresting. The space story vingettes were unbelievable and irrelevant. The only midly interesting part, where there was a fight between moon buggies (because the Great Power were, apparently, unable to eradicate space pirates living on the dark side of the moon) was ridiculous.

I genuinely don’t understand how millions and millions of dollars can be spent on something like this without someone in the room saying “hold on a minute, this is trash, let’s send the money to starving people in Africa instead” or something similar.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

  1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting.
  2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain.
  3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen.
  4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored.
  5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it.

So any movie I watch on a place usually gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.


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