It follows all the beats you'd expect from a "son travels to find his presumed dead father" movie, narratively it takes absolutely zero risks. What makes that so interesting is that everything else about the movie is so inspired, particularly it's often dull presentation of the big set pieces and both Brad and Tommy's relative disengagement from everything exceptional happening around them.

My eyes perked up when I saw the DP in the credits after, because Ad Astra also felt simultaneously very strange and very familiar. Turns out, he was the DP on both Interstellar and Dunkirk, two other movies that captured impossible and fantastic scenarios with both wonder and a sort of, yeah, of course it looks and works like this detachment that I think found its apex here.

But that also means the emotional beats aren't very emotional, and I couldn't tell if that was the point. I saw this movie in a 3/4 full cinema but both during and after the movie I felt like I was walking out of a small arthouse theater into the already-closed bar in the lobby. Nobody was reacting to it during or talking about it after, and I caught myself more than once wishing the movie would get past it's "necessary" action and emotional beats (specifically the punctuation of a mayday call and a lot of the final conversation in deep space) because it just wasn't connecting with me like the sheer visual and audio spectacle on display.

Walking home, I figure that probably was a goal of this movie, to make the audience aware of how the wrapping paper of it all practically stiff arms the audience away from really connecting with its content beyond a visceral discomfort driven by the set design, soundtrack and cinematography. And I really admire that about it; it's a movie I'll like to see again when it comes home to see if it holds up without the potential for surprise and the magnified scope of the theater. It's a far better MOVIE than Dunkirk, but I have a nagging worry it might shed a lot of its intrigue on a home screen with a home audio system in the same way Dunkirk did.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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