I probably made it too clear that I loved the film. I probably talked about it too much.
I think I've also made it clear that James Gray has emerged as a filmmaker who, if he's coming out with a new movie, I'm seeing it in theaters no matter what. Armageddon Time was a bit of a miss from him, at least in my view. Nonetheless, he tends to be an ambitious and interesting filmmaker.
All that said, Dave Cullen is a critic who I enjoy. Sharing this is a steel man. He disagrees with me, and he makes valid points.
One thing that I won't fight him on is the voice over. The thing is, James Gray himself wouldn't fight him on the voice over. James Gray has said publicly that he never wanted the voice over, and that the studio forced his hand. I wish that I could have seen this movie without voice over as much as I wish that I had seen the Director's Cut of Dark City -- the cut without the voice over -- first.
So, at this point, I'm gonna get into spoilers, as will the video if you click the link.
I do have to acknowledge that there are "and then" moments in the movie. There is screen time spent that doesn't directly advance the plot. I agree that that is generally something I don't like. But, there have stories that have been read and celebrated for millenia that have broken that rule. This film always seemed to me to be a sci-fi take on Heart of Darkness more-so than a movie that was trying to do Interstellar.
One thing that I'll absolutely push back on is the idea that the film was saying that the Lima Project proved that there was no intelligent life in the galaxy.
Even if that were what the film was saying, it's a thematic point. James Gray made two films in a row, Ad Astra being the stronger movie to my mind, about the obsession exploration blinding people to what they have right in front of them.
Still, when Roy tells his father that he didn't fail in his mission to find alien life, and says, "Now we know. We're all we got." That's not saying that the project disproved the existence of alien life in the galaxy.
This is a hard sci-fi movie. There's no faster than light travel in the film. There's no warp drive or hyper drive. Space travel is still a long and arduous process in this film's universe.
The point wasn't to say that there's nothing out there. The the point is that we can become so obsessed with finding something grander than ourselves that we can lose sight of the human relationships in our lives that we already have.
Also, to be fair, I think that that line, and the perspective that the film takes, is what I think is the reality of alien life.
I do think that there's something out there. As Cullen said, there are billions upon billions of stars and trillions upon trillions of planets. I have a generous take on the Drake Equation. I think that there are probably countless intelligent alien species in the universe.
Even if I'm right, that doesn't mean that we're not alone in the universe, at least for the foreseeable future.
Even if we could travel at 90% the speed of light, it would take nearly a decade to get to the nearest star aside from the sun. With time dilation, it becomes even more complicated.
There could be billions of intelligent species in the universe, and we may never cross paths.
The point remains -- "We're all we got."