I watched Ad Astra the other day.
It is now one of my favorite films. But not because it is a serious science fiction drama, but because it is an absurdist comic noir masterpiece.
At first it seemed to be a serious science fiction drama. Arthur Clark's space elevator brought to life. Explosions. Heroics. Emotionally resonant reflection. A mission to save the world and resolve the protagonist's issues.
Just like every other science fiction drama.
But the dead-pan delivery, purported to be due to our hero's extreme emotional compartmentalization, begins to raise a wry smile in all the wrong places. In many spots, it is entirely at odds with the overarching seriousness of the situation. And then often enough the situation is so utterly ridiculous, it's also at odds with any overarching seriousness. We're in the War Room of Dr. Strangelove, but nobody is cracking jokes about getting their hair mussed in an atomic exchange. We're in Men in Black except there are no funny aliens. This is a WASP Space Balls with good visual effects. It's as if the universe of Ad Astra is conspiring to make all us serious people thinking serious things about serious matters look rather silly.
Consider:
Three highly-trained professional astronauts accidentally kill themselves within a matter of one minute in their own capsule while trying to kill our hero. The scene is a parody of physical comedy and slapstick incompetence. Wilie E. Coyote could not have done himself in better. One by banging her head on a wall, another by shooting open a can of some kind of gas, and a third with his own knife. Our hero then radios the people who ordered the deceased to kill him, saying:
Roy McBride: Mission, this is Major Roy McBride. I boarded the Cepheus against mission directives. I did not do so with hostile intent. But because of my actions, I regret to inform you, all crew members are now deceased.
(all quotations from here)
I regret to inform you? Even the US government, when it kills the three Ryan brothers in Saving Private Ryan, sends a person to inform their mother, instead of a form letter. Major Roy McBride's crispy-dry form letter back to his government, after witnessing and participating in one of the most ridiculous accidental triple suicides in film history, is a brilliantly funny bit of black humor.
In this light, earlier scenes that seemed simply bad become funny.
We have top Space Generals asking a top Space Major to please describe what he knows about his World Famous Father.
Lt. Gen. Rivas: Major, what can you tell us about the Lima Project?
Roy McBride: First manned expedition to the outer solar system, sir. Some twenty-nine years ago, as you know.
Lt. Gen. Rivas: And the commander was?
Roy McBride: He was my father, sir.
On one level, this is exposition at its worst. Disengaged actors blandly reading lines to fill the backstory: telling us, not showing us. But here it is so bad that the effect is comic. Rivas asks Roy a question everyone on earth knows the answer to -- is it a Jedi Mind Trick question to elicit a "telling" response from Roy? Well, Roy has just been revealed to be Mr. Super-Even Temper! And he proves it! By telling Rivas the obvious. We've just learned so much!
This is exposition that makes fun of Exposition. This is the insight from Men In Black brought to life-- "Thank you Gentlemen! You are all we have come to expect from years of government training." These Generals are in charge of everything? Dark Helmet asks better questions.
In addition to the the self-inflicted deaths of three highly-trained professional astronauts at the hands of parts of their own capsule, we have enraged space monkeys eating their minders. Bizarre space horror takes an Ed Wood turn.
Yeah, folks. That's what's out there in space. Our big challenges in conquering the universe are really pissed-off carnivorous experimental monkeys. I saw it coming, I really did. I'm surprised James Gray didn't go for carnivorous tomato plants.
Roy solves the situation by blowing up the monkeys (they go splat rather emphatically). Afterwards he has a moving scene explaining his life philosophy to a computer program. If the simple summary of this scene isn't absurd enough, consider the content of the dialogue:
Roy McBride: Well, that’s it. I mean, we go to work, we do our jobs, and then it’s over. We’re here, and then we’re gone.
Roy's existential philosophical theory in a nutshell, this is. Jean Paul Sartre must have been a consultant on the script.
Then, he really gets into it.
Automated Voice: Please describe how the incident itself affected you.
Roy McBride: The attack, it was full of rage. I understand that rage. I’ve seen that rage in my father, and I’ve seen that rage in me. Because I’m angry that he took off. He left us. You know, but when I look at that anger, and if I push it aside, and just put it away, all I see is hurt. I just see pain. I think it keeps me walled off, walled off from relationships and opening myself up, and, you know, really caring for someone. And I don’t know how to get past that. I don’t know how to get around that. And it worries me. And I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be my dad.
Automated Voice: Your psychological evaluation has been approved.
Putting the oddness of experimental monkey-rage to one side, we find here the core of Roy's motivation, the driving force behind his completely-emotionally-disengaged character. It's a touching moment, or should be: the rage so many sons feel for their absent or disdainful fathers, the lack of any social empathy for it, or any understanding by anyone in his life (some have found this a very moving scene for just this resonance).
And the only response Roy gets is a cold, authoritarian computer voice "approving" his emotions? Bwahahahahaha! The irony would flatten a city of shirts. It's not just heavy, it's Bathos defined. (Now go look up Bathos online, you Philistine).
The scene presents important, deep feelings, and mocks them.
The climactic scene, when dad and son meet, leads to the (omigosh) discovery that we are alone in the galaxy. Our hero Roy's observation, looking at is dad, is that "Now, we know we’re all we’ve got."
The biggest discovery ever! Confirming Fermi's paradox! (more on this later) And all Brad Pitt has to say is a mawkish sentimental observation on the importance of family????? What is this, the Hallmark Channel????
In a Hallmark card, this works. It's a nice thought. It is important to express of connection sometimes to friends and family. With a smiley face emoticon.
The anti-climax of this climax is extreme: the meaning of the universe IS (drumroll please) -- Appreciate the little things in life! After all the serious science fiction drama, all the deaths in getting Roy to his father, the people Clifford has killed on the research vessel, all the destruction from the "Surge" on Earth, we learn that we have each other? Awwwww.
If you insist on this movie as a big-budget, serious science fiction drama, this kind of "insight" gained from trillions of dollars in space exploration and lives wasted, the line "Now, we know we’re all we’ve got" is a clown horn honked at the height of Beethoven's Ninth.
But in an absurdist universe, of course all we have is each other.
No. Wait.
In fact, we don't. As Roy is looking for meaning in an absurdist universe, he's looking for love in all the wrong places, as the old song goes. Clifford says "let me go" and floats off to his death. Sorry Roy! You don't even have each other! Dad just eliminated himself from the equation!
And so the sum of existence is realizing all we have is each other, and that we don't have each other. This is a brilliantly reductionist conclusion, using Hallmark card sentiment in a totally serious manner then proving it wrong, leaving us with...?
Gosh. We're all alone in the universe. I mean alone alone. As in Alone.
Roy's Final Summary Movie Insight is as follows:
Roy McBride: I’m steady, calm. I slept well. No bad dreams. I am active and engaged. I’m aware of my surroundings and those in my immediate sphere. I’m attentive. I’m focused on the essentials, to the exclusion of all else. I’m unsure of the future, but I’m not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live and love. Submit.
Voltaire could not have penned better lines for Candide. I wonder if Roy thought up his Kindergarten platitudes on his way back to earth and the auto-da-fe awaiting him for disobeying orders.
I do wonder if the dry humor of this movie was lost on its actors, who seem to believe they were in a serious, insightful, somber and ambitious drama. It's a bit like watching Eyes Wide Shut in which Kubrick cast two shallow actors to play shallow characters, but didn't let them in on the joke. But at times it feels as if James Gray wasn't even in on the joke, that his script writers handed him stuff and said, with a straight face, "We've written Roy as a very serious man, so conflicted inside (mmmmff)... we've come up with deadly serious obstacles in the way of his eventual closure with his (giggle) father... saves the solar system along the way... we've embedded deadly serious insightful meaningful (snicker) observations... kept it (bwahaha) simple of course. Roy is simple, he doesn't over-complicate (hehehehehehe)...
So I come away realizing that Ad Astra is just-so-slightly stealthily hilarious! It could only be funnier if the script writers weren't even in on the joke. Then truly, the joke would on humanity as a whole, as we drift through our empty universe making funny noises with our lips to pass the time...
---
A note on Fermi's Paradox
Fermi's Paradox is the real science behind this movie, whether the writers realize it or not.
The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years from edge to edge, Fermi reasoned, which means that a star-faring species would need about 10 million years to traverse it, even if moving at a very modest velocity of 1 percent of the speed of light. Since the galaxy is more than a thousand times older than this, any technological civilization will have had a lot of time in which to expand and colonize the whole galaxy. If one species were to fail in this endeavour, another wouldn’t. Consequently, if intelligent species were out there in any appreciable numbers, they would have been here already. And yet, we do not see them on Earth or in the solar system. For Fermi and many thinkers since, this constituted a paradox.
The "Great Silence" we know, every day we look up at the stars and see/hear nothing is indeed a hard problem for science to answer. To an evolutionist, the idea that somehow we (intelligent, sentient, industrious beings) are all alone in the universe, is repugnant in the extreme.We should be common. But so far, all the (credible) evidence suggests that we are not.
But pause for a moment about the assumptions that Fermi made. The first is that aliens would want to expand into the galaxy the way some of us do (one could argue that whales, or elephants, due to their larger brains, are more intelligent than we are. Technology is a dumb intermediate stage. True intelligent species do not make space rockets and stay home or travel other ways). The second is that aliens could expand into the galaxy (there is much to suggest that life on earth is all interconnected, and uprooting one small part and transplanting it elsewhere is not so easy as finding a planet with liquid water and landing on it. Perhaps it is insurmountable?). The third is that we could recognize alien life if we saw it. Who says it has to be carbon-based meat like us? Maybe we're surrounded by alien life and simply can't recognize it?
In short, Fermi's Paradox is irrelevant. If we're after company in the galaxy, we will never find it, no matter how many space slugs or space whales or sentient clouds the galaxy teems with. And by the absence of any ancient alien radio waves for all our looking, creatures like us (with televisions) do in fact seem to be a bit rare out there.
Cheers to just having each other!
Now go away, kid, you annoy me -- W.C. Fields
most of this could be washed with a bit of bleach and describe almost any movie being made these days (or in the last three decades.) it's not jsut ad astra. it could be the most absurd watchmen (which has almost a negative involvement with the comic book). really, anything. movies are made for anyone willing to watch. there is rarely a desire to make art, i think. making a buck, though, is smart. look at the blumhouse horrors. he even says he'll invest in crap because crap sells. he's super rich! are you surprised that ad astra is any different? would you compare it to "game of thrones?" or, let's go back "full metal jacket"? they both are full of slutty positions to get us to watch. they are full of fallacies and magical slights to keep us entertained.
Posted by: Peter R Stark | March 15, 2020 at 10:37 PM
Of course Hollywood movies are all sluts. They are refined marketing tools designed to extract $ from pockets as efficiently as possible, manufactured by investment management teams who comb through every line, image and product placemet for its marketability. Much like music, we have to go waaaay back to find producers taking a chance on the vision of a director. Kubrick's last 2-3 movies were pranks on the industry, as he was one of the few who still had independence and knew what to do with it. James Cameron might have "independence", but largely because he is an investment management team-in-one.
Cynical, yes, and spots of humanity occasionally (accidentally?) shine through in Hollywood movies.
But for exercises in sustained accidental ironies heaped on ironies? Does Ad Astra have much competition? In Watchmen, I see amateur-grade highjacked intent, let's give this alternate-universe scenario a softer, more appealing message. No?
Posted by: Strother | March 16, 2020 at 08:20 AM