There are more important things to talk about than movies, but another made an impression on me on a long flight yesterday: Ad Astra. I found it pretentious, tedious, humorless, and senseless. It features two very funny actors, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones, trying to be serious and profound. The resultant failure is more Clooney's fault, since we have to put up with his mug the whole movie long, while Jones is hanging around in a broken-down spaceship near one of Neptune's rings, waiting to ambush us with further reckless assaults of inanity. (And maybe destroy Planet Earth, why or how not clear.)
Apparently they were going for a Heart of Darkness motif. Instead of traveling up a river in the Congo or Cambodia, Clooney travels from the moon to Mars then on to the outer planets, having senseless adventures at a few stops along the way. (One involving a Norwegian science space ship in which the monkeys have taken over from the humans, and they are pissed. An more primal and localized Planet of the Apes, but come on -- would Norwegians be so mean to monkeys? And if they wanted to take primates for a joy ride, like Bill Murray driving off a cliff in space with his groundhog, why drive three billion miles? Then have Monkey Rage break out just beside the road to Neptune -- what are the odds, in a three dimensional solar system?)
Spoiler alert: there's nothing to spoil. Tommy Lee Jones turns out to have a beard and has killed a bunch of people for no very clear reason. He is determined to find aliens but is looking in a very unpromising neighborhood. From which Clooney brilliantly deduces there are no aliens to be found. So Clooney nukes his Dad's space ship. Maybe he had this bad ride of movie coming, after busting his two buddies out of prison on false pretenses in Brother, Where Art Thou. One thing's for sure: a cow on the roof would be a relief in this stinker of a movie.
Ad Astra is a voyage through humorless space far away indeed from that drop of golden sun. Let the dog bite. Let the bee sting. You'll thank them for the superior entertainment value of their attacks, if they interrupt you while watching Ad Astra. It's not one of my favorite things.