AD ASTRA–“Ad Astra” is a really good movie until it suddenly isn’t. There’s an old saying that if you had to choose, you’d rather have a movie start poorly and end well than the other way around, because bad endings are more recent in your mind and cast a pall over what came before. “Ad Astra” proves this to be true. For long stretches, it’s a really fascinating (albeit hugely scientifically inaccurate) film, but its conclusion bogs down in bloodless trope, and now I’m struggling to reconnect with the emotions I felt earlier on.
Let’s focus on the positive: Brad Pitt is great; he really is underrated and was born for a role like this. The visual effects are unimpeachable. The cinematography looks a LOT like “Interstellar,” perhaps because they hired that movie’s cinematographer. But my favorite thing about “Ad Astra” is its setting: the somewhat, but not super distant, future. This is an area not as often covered in science fiction cinema, and it produces set pieces no one else has ever even thought of.
Writer/director James Gray clearly sat down and thought hard about what kind of shenanigans you might get into trying to go from Earth to Neptune in a time when that’s POSSIBLE but difficult. It’s like a frontier journey story where the frontier is space. There’s a Moon buggie chase/shootout that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, it’s one of the best action sequences I can remember. Ditto for a horrifying SOS response call sequence that baffled, surprised and horrified me. Neither of these sequences would work in “Star Trek” or “Gravity,” they are incredibly specific to “Astra’s” timeline. They would’ve worked in “Interstellar,” but frankly, “Interstellar” didn’t think of them, and should have.
The problem is, the emotional core of the story isn’t there. “Ad Astra” wants to be “Apocalypse Now,” a cold and alienating journey into the dark night of the soul, but towards the end it suddenly decides to be a weepy drama, and that crap just does not play. The voice over narration at the end literally made me roll my eyes, and I’m not someone who does that. Liv Tyler plays the most Liv Tyler-y role in the universe, a crazy unconvincing and tropey frustrated wife who has left for foggy, unspecified reasons. Tommy Lee Jones plays Pitt’s father, and I won’t give away what happens there, except to say I didn’t like it, didn’t buy it, and felt nothing as a result of it.
It’s weird to watch a movie that is so inventive and original fall back on cliches that even a “Fast and Furious” movie would furrow its brow at. I think “Astra” would have been better off without the father-son story at all. As “All The President’s Men” proves, sometimes process is fascinating enough to not need much else. Too many filmmakers assume that adding backstory or some kind of “my dad never loved me” subplot automatically improves a movie, but that’s really not true. Many of the best movies ever made don’t tell you ANYTHING beyond the bare essentials about their characters. And these aren’t shallow movies, either. I don’t know anything about the family life of Kirk Douglas’ character in “Paths of Glory,” and I don’t care. Hacks fall back on these tropes as a shortcut to emotional investment and it rarely works. James Gray is no hack, but he made a misstep here.
So where does “Ad Astra” land for me? I really like it, but I wanted to love it and thought I was going to for a while there, and I’m really bummed about that.
IS IT BETTER THAN “INTERSTELLAR?”
… I’m saying no. “Interstellar” is more flawed, but also more successful. It has emotional moments that really punch, and while I knocked it for not thinking of the buggie chase, it also has its fair share of jaw-dropping action spectacle and space photography. “Astra” is a tighter, cleaner movie but its ceiling is lower. This is just personal preference, though, and a fair case could be made that I’m wrong.
UNTITLED GOOSE GAME–“Untitled Goose Game,” if you haven’t heard, is a charmingly mean-spirited little adventure where you play a troublesome goose that wanders into a small village and wrecks havoc on everyone. Your goals are simple, mean-spirited tasks: make the gardener hammer his own thumb, scare a kid into a phone booth, steal the keys to the gate. Of course it’s all harmless, “Looney Tunes” stuff, and its disarming “gosh darn you goose!” vibe is part of why people like me attach to it strongly. It’s both incredibly wicked and profoundly sweet.
The goose himself, waddling around and honking at people, perfectly encapsulates the childlike naughtiness that resides in all or most of us. He doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone, he just wants to cause a little mayhem. This is fundamentally human. There’s a supreme pleasure in inconveniencing and bothering people, and anyone who says there isn’t is either lying or a sociopath. It’s a release valve for the pressure we all build up as we deal with one another. I also think it’s a sign of social intelligence: in order to derive pleasure from small misfortunes, you have to be able to accurately assess what will be humorous and non-damaging. You have to be able to think like other people, anticipate them (“The Office” proved this by showing what Michael Scott considers to be a funny prank, which was often just awful or embarrassing, demonstrating his low social IQ) It’s actually a complex emotional task, and “Untitled Goose Game” is excellent at making you feel like you’re doing it.
I’m reminded of something I saw my father do once. We were at Busch Gardens, the amusement park in Williamsburg Virginia, and there’s an “Escape from Pompeii” ride that’s basically a gussied-up log flume with requisite drop at the end. But “Pompeii” has a twist: as you ride your little boat thingie around the corner to dock and get off the ride, there are water cannons hidden in the bushes which other patrons can use to blast you with an unexpected shot of water. This isn’t a big deal, since anyone on that boat already got more than a little soaked by the ride itself, but it does catch people off guard. It’s a moment of pure, honest human shock that has no emotional or physical consequences.
My father, a family man with a storied career in the Department of Justice and an adept musician to boot, was reduced to the mental state of a ten year old by this water cannon. He lingered by it all day, a stack of quarters in his hand and a beaming smile on his face. The sheer joy he got from watching wet people take just ONE MORE little hit of water that they didn’t see coming was something he could not put into words. It scratched a deep itch.
Video games scratch this itch all the time. I’m not a big “Grand Theft Auto” fan, but I’ve watched a lot of people play it, and I notice that no one–not your best friend, your grandmother, your boss, your pastor, nobody–obeys the rules of the road in that game. No matter who they are, as soon as you hand them that controller, they are running over people and crashing into things. Nothing in GTA REQUIRES you to behave that way (in free play, that is), in theory you COULD just peacefully make your way where you’re going, but literally no one does. They can shout “whoops” or “oh dear” all they want, they are still a wrecking ball. And you can’t actually blame the game for that. There’s no text box that says “KILL” or timer counting down until you explode. The innocent civilians aren’t lit up red like targets. It’s just a simulacrum of the world with the consequences gone. Everyone encounters this in the same way: they go insane.
This isn’t mysterious to me. The fact that violence is in our DNA, combined with the hundreds of grievances and frustrations we are constantly fielding from our fellow man, creates some build up in our system that I think is healthy to let out, within reason. It’s the same reason our cat attacks my legs and stalks me around the house: she’s a retired hunter, and the old muscle memory is still there, so she works it out of her system in her play, in a safe atmosphere.
BORDERLANDS 3–I was really not on the “Borderlands 3” train. The trailers didn’t impress me. The list of new features was barren. It was going to be a relic of the past, I decided, out of touch and clinging to nostalgia. I bought it grudgingly because the people I play games with all bought it.
Right away, I knew I’d been wrong.
“Borderlands 3” doesn’t change much because, frankly, it does not need to. There’s a reason this franchise has always overperformed. Gearbox smartly updated the shooting to make it feel modern, jazzed up the volume and variety of guns, tossed in a ton of exotic locales and wild boss fights, deeply padded the end game, and left everything else the hell alone. There are people who think they haven’t changed enough here, and I was absolutely POSITIVE I was going to be one of them, but I’ve put in over 30 hours and nope, they were right. Some things are evergreen.
If they’d changed any more, they’d have had New Coke on their hands. The hardest thing to do is be humble enough to admit when well enough should be left alone. I also love that the franchise continues to completely disregard the concept of gameplay balance. This is the freedom that not having multiplayer gives you. Tons of weapons are overpowered, tons of abilities work too well and stack upon each other to have unintended consequences, but Gearbox clearly does not care and they’re right not to. The FUN of the game is finding this stuff and wrecking the game to pieces. It’s a playground. I feel genuinely bad for Blizzard and Bungie, wading onto the recess field and taking away things they know damn well the player is enjoying. They HAVE to do that (well, Blizzard does, Bungie never should’ve put Crucible in “Destiny,” fight me). Gearbox doesn’t, and don’t think they don’t enjoy the fact.
From a gameplay perspective, it’s nearly unimpeachable, except for some serious performance issues. From a narrative point of view… eh. I’ve never been wild about “Borderlands'” treatment of little people, and it feels even more tone deaf now. The new villains are really bad, some kind of half-thought-through joke about Twitch streamers that has no punchline. There are some zingers that get me laughing, but they’re mostly buried in the side quests and small character moments. I WILL give them credit for having a wide variety of female characters, though; they’d pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors.
It’s a fun game. It gets the job done. Like The Black Keys record I enjoyed earlier this year, “Let’s Rock,” its victory is knowing when NOT to change. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing.