Watch The Expanse. : )
You’ve got me there! I’ve been meaning to get to that.
Warning, spoilers. Assume everyone in the thread is aware.
I agree on your critique regarding characters, but I think it is a bit of a misstep to say that you should watch Interstellar or Space Odyssey instead, since clearly this movie was not supposed to be about the same ideas at all. You could even argue that this is in a way anti-interstellar. The message is bleak and portrays humanity almost as a disease that has now infected the moon, and possibly now other worlds as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people who like The New World by Terrence Malick would actually also like this. But yeah, clearly the setpieces are out of place, and they almost feel like they were added because a producer wanted action thriller moments, while they didn’t clearly belong to this experience. And it didn’t help that this came across as a movie with strong scifi -themes, but ended actually being a philosophical story of humanity and obsession.
We could’ve lived without the moon-buggy shootout or skateboarding through the neptunus -ring, and the movie would actually be artistically stronger and clearer for it.
I’m starting to come around to the idea that I really liked this–but I’m a big Terrence Malick fan, so guilty as charged.
I think the movie this actually might most remind me of is Apocalypse Now?
Yep, the plot structure is very clearly based on Apocalypse Now - the protagonist travels on a secret mission to deal with a rogue element. There are some obvious intentional shoutouts, like the scene where the main character gets close to his goal and sees materials summarizing his goal’s altered state of mind. The twist being instead of “exterminate all the brutes,” this time it’s "yes yes yes.")
The plot structure of Apocalypse Now is episodic, a series of narratively independent incidents as the protagonist travels from point A to B. Apocalypse Now gets away with this loose “and then …” structure by making all the incidents thematically related. Here … well, not so much. I’m not sure there’s any reason for the killer space monkey other than someone thought it was cool.
Thanks-- this comment makes all the others make sense to me.
Well, they needed it so that they could kill off the real captain, meaning that the mission would be run by the incompetent 2nd in command, so that the lady wot wanted Tommy Lee Jones killed would have no option but to get Brad Pitt to hijack a rocket by climbing onto it during liftoff, and then killing the whole crew with a canister of what I can only assume was a powerful nerve toxin that really had no business being exposed on a spaceship. Which is of course just a sublime parallel to Tommy Lee Jones killing his whole crew.
See, it makes perfect sense. Except maybe for the part where they decelerated to a full stop in the middle of a Moon → Mars orbital transition.
My wife was saying “we need to get out more” so we went out and saw this yesterday as part of an extravaganza (the other part was buying dinner at Wegmans… we know how to live!). Put me in the “hated it” camp. A number of things:
I objected to the whole premise of "we’re getting this burst of energy that’s from your father. We think this because it uses EnergyX which is what his spaceship used. So they’re gonna spend the money to fly Brad from Earth to the Moon to Mars to the dark side of Mars on this tenuous thread? Like that spaceship is the only thing in the universe that uses that type of energy? It felt like a super weak excuse to get Brad involved.
And then… we’re gonna fly you to Mars so you can shoot messages off into space… to a father you haven’t spoken to in 27 years… because… uh… because… because the plot says so. Also super weak.
Then, briefly:
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The space monkey. Ugh. Brad can’t take command of the ship to carry out his classified mission without revealing the mission? Uh… what a load of crap. Have they ever heard of NEED TO KNOW. If he’s really on a classified mission he would be able to say “I am on a classified mission and I’m overriding your orders.” Dumb.
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Mars buggy fighting. Double ugh.
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Crawling through the martian sewers. SO DUMB. A scene with negative tension. There is absolutely zero tension there as he is trying to get into the rocket before it blasts off. You know with 100% certainty he’s going to make it because where do we go if he doesn’t make it in? So it’s just a waste of time sloooooly following him going through the tunnels (and… there’s condensed water in the tunnels? Really? Wouldn’t that stuff just get absorbed into the atmosphere considering there’s no water anywhere else on Mars so the humidity must be at -100%?)
Is there a character arc here? I mean, Brad is different at the end, we see the evidence that people now mean something to him. So he changed from the interactions with his father? Based on… seeing his father sacrifice his entire lifespan for his work?
Way too many ponderous scenes, needed some editing.
I even hated all the trailers they showed before this movie (Midway, the WW1 movie, Ford v Ferrari, two or three other “serious” movies for the fall).
They definitely hand-waved a lot of the space stuff.
Neptune is about 4 light hours from Earth. And since Earth and Mars are only about 4 light minutes apart, it’s about 4 light hours from Mars, too.
It means any kind of “conversation” would need 8 hours to send-and-reply. Why even have Roy wait around in the room? (And why did they even need Roy? They could have had anyone claim they were Roy; the last time they saw each other was like 30 years prior, and it’s not like you can really tell over a noisy radio from billions of miles away).
All right, maybe I’ll wait for Netflix.
Yeah I actually looked up the time-delay while in the theatre it annoyed me so much…
The moon-buggies also really annoyed me. The original Apollo rovers looked that way because they were optimised to be as light as possible. In a future where we’ve built strip-malls with escalators on the Moon, weight is clearly no longer an issue, and a moon buggy would look totally different. Like, it’d actually be enclosed for a start.
About half way through after a bunch of mental state checks and a very prominant sign on the wall that says “there is hope call the crisis hotline” it was clear this was an artistic movie about mental health set in a space setting.
I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. I’m still processing how different it was to my expectation from the trailers
I haven’t read the rest of this thread so forgive me if this has been covered already but the only way this movie makes sense is if it was entirely written by AI. Even the worst writer would accidentally write several lines that rang true. I’m kind of in awe at how terrible the script was. Like, I don’t know how it was even possible. I went through a phase of being baffled t how bad it was to anger to laughing and then finally to wonderment at the achievement. Not one word of the script felt like something written by an actual person. It’s astonishing.
I would have left the movie during the anger phase, something I think I’ve only done once and I’ve seen some terrible movies but it was fucking gorgeous. The space suits, the ships, the cinematography was some of the best I’ve ever seen in a space movie. I think the best way to enjoy this movie would be to watch it on the big screen wearing noise canceling head phones and making up a story and dialog as you go.
But if it was actually entirely written by AI then it is a super interesting movie.
This is the perfect review.
I love space. I love space shows, space movies, space podcasts. I like everything about planets, lasers, spaceships, aliens, Tommy Lee Jones, this movie looked like it had it all. Turns out it had all those things and made them all terrible! 3/10, would not recommend. I should have seen Rambo 5 instead.
The movie lost me with its insultingly inane opening text. It did not improve much from there. It’s definitely got some beautiful shots, and I’d perhaps welcome a smarter, more plot-driven movie with a lot of its space-civilization aesthetics (if hopefully in ways that weren’t completely and obviously unrealistic as they were here - I rolled my eyes so many times at the nonsense they were pretending was hard SF), and its excellent cast. But this is not that.
Who is they? It’s not the movie.
Why do you think they used the space suits, rockets, and other heavily NASA-influenced space imagery if they weren’t trying to sell an aura of real world space tech?
I think they wanted it to be set in a near future government space agency, which requires those trappings and familiar imagery. I don’t think that’s the same as going for hard sci-fi. I can’t think of any point where they attempted to be precise about technological capabilities or portrayed some event as a necessary outcome of a technology.
It doesn’t, though. You could quite easily suggest a near future where aesthetics and design have changed significantly (many movies have). And those trappings are designed the way they are for real world reasons and imply real world conditions that the movie completely and totally disregards in ways that undermine its world far more fundamentally than they would have if they hadn’t invoked those trappings.