“One thing i love about Armageddon Time is that it’s kind of an origin story for AD ASTRA, which some people have embarrassingly yet to acknowledge as an unequivocal masterpiece on account of how dumb they are.” James Gray’s “Ad Astra” was one of the most frustrating watches I’ve had at a film the last 10 years or so. You can’t help but admire the ambitions of Gray in trying to make his space-opera, and yet the story doesn’t truly soar to the heights he may have wanted. I’ve seen “Ad Astra” three times, and I’ll admit some sequences took my breath away, but it kept getting bogged down by the overusage of narration and the sense that this truly wasn’t the vision Gray had intended to show us. Back in September of 2019, I reported about the reshoots that occurred on “Ad Astra,” without Gray’s consent. “The inner conflicts between Gray and Fox included forced-upon reshoots. What those scenes were, we aren’t entirely sure, but as mentioned in my review of the film this week, you can tell there are two separate visions of the story being told on-screen, it’s a schizoid-feeling film, which, despite the production drama, has amassed very good reviews so far. Gray fought hard for final cut, there’s no doubt about that, but he eventually lost that battle.” “Ad Astra” is an anomaly in the Gray oeuvre. I find he’s one of the great American directors working today, “Two Lovers,” and “The Lost City of Z” are flat-out great movies. “Armageddon Time,” and “We Own the Night” aren’t too far behind either. Quentin Tarantino wasn’t a fan of “Ad Astra”: “In the whole second half of [‘Ad Astra’], I don’t know why anything is happening,” Tarantino said. “We’re just supposed to agree with them about everything that they say, but I don’t know why this is working or why that is working; why a mutiny on a ship that happened 15 years ago is now sending surges that has killed 40,000 people. We just go with it because they tell us that’s what’s happening.” “What you respond to in that movie is they took the entire structure of ‘Apocalypse Now,’” the director continued. “I mean, exactly. … I enjoyed watching ‘Ad Astra,’ it was a very pretty movie and I loved Brad in it, but I didn’t understand why things were happening. Nolan doesn’t really tell us anything that’s going on in ‘Dunkirk,’ but I have a sense of what’s happening.” in my 09.17.19 review of “Ad Astra” I wrote: “This is Gray trying to make his own space odyssey but without the grab-me-by-the-neck hypnotism of the obvious classic forebearers. The narration by McBride feels too overused, an almost Malick-ian approach from Gray, with voiceover passages that feel more pretentious than authentic. It doesn’t help that the father-son story doesn’t really grab the viewer either, I quite simply didn’t care for the emotional stakes at hand in “Ad Astra.” The end result left me wanting more, much more, but the fascinating moments, even the ones that fail, are hard to dismiss as just fodder, if you’re a serious-minded cinephile looking to be challenged at the movies then this is something worth seeing and then grasping.“ Contribute Hire me
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