Ad Astra (2019)

Space is boring.  It’s mind-numbingly boring.  It’s a whole lot of nothing with a little bit of stuff thrown in here and there.  You might find something worth looking at, but you’ll probably spend most of your time with little or nothing to do.  Maybe you’ll be alone.  Maybe you’ll have someone to pass the time with.  All things considered, though, you have a lot of nothing to look forward to.  Bring a book.

I’m sorry.  Did I say space?  I meant Ad Astra.  When I saw the coming attractions, I thought that it might be some big thing about how a space mission went wrong.  The movie starts with Roy McBride.  He’s supposed to be this legend.  His pulse never goes above 80, which makes him great for dangerous work.  Unfortunately, dangerous work doesn’t lend itself to things like marriage.

One day, he’s called in to a top-secret mission about the Lima Project.  What’s so special about the Lima Project?  It was headed by H. Clifford McBride, Roy’s father.  The mission was lost in the outer reaches of space.  The military thinks that the space ship might be responsible for power surges on Earth.  It’s never explained exactly why this is.  All we know is that Roy is supposed to go to Mars so that he can send a message to his father asking what’s going on.

So, Roy goes to the moon, where he’s attacked by space pirates or something.  He makes it to where he’s supposed to be so that he can get to Mars.  Along the way, the crew of the ship has to stop for another ship in distress.  It turns out that’s a lost cause, so it’s on to Mars, where Roy sends several messages to his father.

I don’t want to go much further, on the off chance that you really want to see the movie.  I will warn you that it is boring.  (Go back and read the first paragraph with Ad Astra standing in for space.)  I spent a good chunk of the movie waiting for something to happen.  It’s one of those movies where you expect some major revelation, yet get something that’s not at all that major.  I suspect it was supposed to be a big revelation, but it wasn’t.

In fact, the only good thing that I can say is that it’s a good movie to watch in IMAX.  The visuals are great, but I think we’re past going to the movies to see pretty pictures of the planets.  I would have preferred a little more substance.  It’s almost like one of those paintings where the artist has a line and a dot.  You know it’s supposed to represent something, but what?  I think the detour to help the stranded ship was supposed to mean something.  I’m not sure if it was just there to liven things up.  Maybe make sure the audience was still awake.

In the end, the movie is like Roy’s pulse.  It never gets above a certain pace.  We might get one or two exciting scenes, but there’s no thrill because we can see it coming.  I’d tell you to see it in IMAX, but I’m not sure it would be worth the extra money.

IMDb page

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

 

I’ve always been good at determining if I’d like a movie by the coming attractions.  I know that you can’t really judge a book by its cover, but I’m right 99.99% of the time.  While I liked Inglourious Basterds, I have to say that it wasn’t quite what I expected.

The movie starts with Colonel Hans Landa visiting a family on a dairy farm.  It’s the start of the German occupation of France and Colonel Landa is a Nazi officer looking for the one remaining Jewish family in the area.  He considers himself pretty good at what he does, as do many of the people that he’s come across.  It’s earned him the nickname The Jew Hunter.  He does find the family that he’s looking for, but allows one of them to escape.

Around the same time, American Lieutenant Aldo Raine is talking to his men.  He’s leading a group of men into France to hunt Nazis.  The group is made up of Jews, but come from all over the world.  One has even killed 13 Nazi officers before joining the group, known as the Inglourious Basterds.  The war hasn’t officially started for America, but the Basterds are going over a little early to get things rolling.

Fast forward a few years.  The woman that escaped Col. Landa is now running a theater under an assumed name, Emmanuelle Mimieux.  She’s approached by a Nazi officer, Pvt. Fredrick Zoller, who takes a liking to her.  Understandably, Ms. Mimieux doesn’t like him.  Pvt. Zoller can’t take ‘get lost’ for an answer, so he pursues her and eventually makes her an offer.  It turns out he’s a war hero that stared in a movie about the event that made him so well known.  He wants to use her theater for the premier.

She doesn’t like this at first, but talks it over with her projectionist.  Being that the projectionist is black, he doesn’t like Nazis, either.  The two decide that having so many Nazis in one place might be a good thing.  They hatch a plot to lock the group in and kill them all.

When the Basterds catch wind of the fact that the top four ranking Nazis (including Hitler) will be in attendance, they hatch a plan of their own.  With the help of a German actress/double agent named Bridget von Hammersmark, they can get in and plant explosives to take down the Nazis.

From the coming attractions, I got the impression that the movie was all about the Basterds.  The truth is that you don’t see much of them in the first half of the movie.  It isn’t until the second half that you really get to see more of them.  The movie is split between The Basterds and Mimieux.  I’m not saying that this is bad.  I can understand wanting to show Brad Pitt in the coming attractions.  It’s just that I could see a lot of people wondering if they got the right movie.

I have to warn you that the movie is more fiction than historical.  While some of the events are true, many of the events are not.  From what I can tell, there was no Bridget von Hammersmark, although she may have been based on an actual person.  (I couldn’t find anything beyond a character page in IMDb, but I’m sure I’ll get someone telling me that I’m wrong on this.)

Also, a good deal of the dialogue is subtitled.  As you might expect, much of the movie is in either French or German.  There’s even a little Italian mixed in.  Some of it is in English, but you can still expect to do a lot of reading.  The subtitles were a little small on my screen, but I do have a small screen.  I think whoever did the subtitles was expecting people to have a bigger TV set.

I’m going to have to put this in the 18+ category for the suitability for children.  This is a very violent movie.  When Landa kills the Jewish family, he does so without any sort of feeling or remorse.  He just kills them.  The Basterds do kill a lot of Nazis.  (Raine tells his men that they each owe him 100 kills and they’re expected to scalp those that they kill.)  Those that they don’t kill are given a scar and sent back to their Nazi commanders to tell them who the Basterds are.

On that topic, I did find one plot inconsistency.  Why put all of your top-ranking officials in one place?  As Landa points out, killing the top four will effectively end the war.  Doesn’t this seem too easy?  Even when the president addresses congress, at least one senator, representative or cabinet member is kept in a safe location just in case.  You’d think that at the very least, they’d have tons of security.

At 153 minutes, it’s a pretty long movie.  A little past the halfway mark, I found myself thinking, “crap… I’ve still got an hour to go?”  At least it picked up in the second half.  It took a while to set up the two main plots.   It really wasn’t that bad.  It‘s just that I thought that the movie had progressed more quickly than it really had.  I do think that the movie could have been trimmed by a few minutes in a few places, but nothing really dragged out to the point where I was waiting for that scene to be over.

Overall, I would recommend it.  I just wouldn’t recommend bringing the kids.  There will be a few uncomfortable moments. 

IMDb page