Ad Astra - "to the stars". SPOILERS Going in to the movie, I was looking forward to something like "The Martian", in that I thought it would show some of the internal and external struggles that would accompany long-duration space travel.

So the movie starts out and we see a competent astronaut (Pitt) getting ready to go on a mission to find his father who was an extremely highly regarded astronaut who went missing on the other side of the solar system years ago, but who may be alive and doing bad things. And then... They show the "young" astronaut Pitt being briefed by a few senior officers at a table, and then we see a montage of his father's life, excelling in this, excelling in that, exceptional in this... and I start thinking "where have I seen this before?" Then we find out that the father might have gone rogue and started killing people and it hit me - a movie of a young(er) man going on a long, introspective journey to find a senior commander who's gone rogue and must be put down? That's "Apocalypse Now"! Once I figured that out, everything fell into place.

This realization led to the most jaw-dropping event in the movie, btw, as I tapped my daughter on the shoulder and whispered, "hey, this is a remake of "Apocalypse Now", and she said, "I've never seen it". That's something I need to correct, and will get to that, but it was a far more dramatic moment for me than the rest of the movie put together.

Anyway, if you know the plot of Apocalypse Now, you know the plot of this movie, except Pitt is by himself so you don't have any "depth" provided by his crewmates on the patrol boat space ship.

On to the moon. The first part of his mission is to travel to the moon and then to Mars to send a laser message out to Neptune. This is where things really started falling apart for me as far as my other goal of seeing "space realism". WHY did he have to spend a couple months traveling to Mars to send a laser message? Why not just send it from Earth and have it transmitted to the moon and then Mars? They never did explain why he had to physically go on this big journey in the first place. I did like how they showed the commercialization of the moon, and it is depressing to think that that's what would really happen, which it would. Then came the big disappointment. Gravity on the moon is 1/6 that of Earth, so I was expecting to see people bouncing around, using magnetic shoes, *something* to show they were *on the moon* and not Earth. Nope. Other than some grey walls, nothing. It's a good thing they kept telling you you were *on the moon* so you knew. Granted, a different filmmaker might have not *had* to tell you you things were different on the moon, they would have *shown* you, but that's not the way this director rolled. There's also a very underwhelming chase scene where the military on the moon gets its rear end handed to it. I don't understand what the point of that was, either. Violent space hillbillies? Why?

Ah, I'm getting kind of tired. The rest of the movie is more of the same. If you want to see 2 hours of Pitt's face being as expressionless and "introspective" as possible, this is the movie for you.

Oops, I can't close without one more thing: So Pitt is out at Neptune and *jumps* from a spinning rotor who knows how many miles through space, getting deflected by rocks, etc., and lands right on his space ship.
Nope, that's not sufficient. I'm all for running head shots in TWD, silly plots, etc., but this? OMG, you couldn't jump off a spinning merry go round at a park and hit the dirt exactly where you wanted to. To jump off something spinning and end up within miles of your ship would be outrageously fortunate. to actually HIT your ship? Impossible. Beyond impossible.

Oops, one more thing. Pitt placed a nuclear bomb on the Neptune station to blow it up. After you are trying to recover from the ludicrousness of his gymnastics feat, Pitt says that he is going to use the power of the nuclear explosion to propel himself home. Sounds great. He does NOT, however, explain how he'll survive the lethal dose of radiation he'll be receiving in the process, but by now, who cares? As an actual highlight, though, when he gets home to Earth they show him being half-carried by soldiers out of his ship, and that DID seem realistic. The Russian Cosmonauts that spent considerable time in space basically had to be carried on their return to Earth as well.

Oops, final (and I mean it this time) note: At the end of this whole thing, you expect to see some sort of growth in him, but what you get is him sitting and taking another psych exam, saying he's happy, but looking just as flat and expressionless as in the rest of the movie, and you leave the theater wondering what the point of the whole thing was. The end.