TLJ went to space like 26 years ago AFAIR

yes... I I thought the exact same thing

You can add a near 60 year old Pitt to the list. It looked absurd during the Dad/Son thing when they are both older men. TLJ is old enough to be Pitt's dad, but barely. For a guy of nearly 60 not to have worked out his relationship issues and yet be repeatedly deemed to have passed psychological tests, when the Earth was entirely dependent on him, was daft. Physics teachers would have been groaning as well I suspect. The movie is full of stuff that makes no sense at all. Guns inside a rocket ship? Really?

Points tho for the Norwegian killer space baboons. Never thought I would encounter such a thing in a movie that takes itself seriously. And moon pirates!

Beautifully filmed. Pity the script is like a mad woman's underwear.

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

You can add a near 60 year old Pitt to the list. It looked absurd during the Dad/Son thing when they are both older men. TLJ is old enough to be Pitt's dad, but barely. For a guy of nearly 60 not to have worked out his relationship issues and yet be repeatedly deemed to have passed psychological tests, when the Earth was entirely dependent on him, was daft. Physics teachers would have been groaning as well I suspect. The movie is full of stuff that makes no sense at all. Guns inside a rocket ship? Really?

Points tho for the Norwegian killer space baboons. Never thought I would encounter such a thing in a movie that takes itself seriously. And moon pirates!

Beautifully filmed. Pity the script is like a mad woman's underwear.

Yeah.....all of those silly and idiotic scenes make me think the first draft of the movie was quite different, and at that point producer looked a the director:"Man....this film is boring as hell......ain't nobody going to watch this crap". To which the director replied:"Well.....hell......add in some god damn space monkeys and moon pirates there! And while your at it how about a scene where an astronaut has to race against the clock and swim through a lake and climb aboard a leaving space rocket!"

Seriously those scenes fit in this movie about as well as I imagine a high octane car chase with gun fights would've fit that Stephen Hawking biography. Moon pirates.....the hell are they pirating up there on the moon....and for how long before they've robbed the whole clientele.

You guys don't think we'll have space pirates? We have pirates and mercenaries online... Why would colonised space be any different?

I'm not going to argue the space monkey... ;)

But even if you're sixty... Your dad is still your dad... It wouldn't work with a young 20 something actor... Maybe one in his thirties, who seems mature... The dynamic of the relationship is different... I though the father son relationship, between two men, not a boy and a man was excellent... it's the defining theme of the movie... how that relationship is intertwined with the ideas of duty, identity and purpose...

Piracy works in the real world because it is a low, in some cases no, cost exercise with the potential for enormous returns. In ancient days a crew of cut throats could take a ship and its crew and be rich. In modern times digital piracy works because it costs nothing to rip a DVD or log onto a download website and a good percent of the population gets free movies forever. For return on investment it is hard to compare.

Moon piracy reverses this equation. It costs shitloads to get to the moon and return. This will never change much just due to simple physics. There is nothing on the moon that isn't here on Earth. It's not like asteroids that some believe may contain commercial quantities of valuable ores. It could be theoretically possible to create viable markets by distorting supply and demand by sabotage and theft. But given the investment required and the unlikeliness of success, a rational actor would be better served just going to a casino and putting everything on black.

And the idea that any power, state or commercial, capable of creating and sustaining a moon colony would respond to piracy merely by having a dude ride shotgun on a buggy, as tho this were the stagecoach from Santa Fe travelling thru 'injun territory', is flat out moronic.

But it isn't just that the idea makes no economic or scientific sense. It's also that it makes no dramatic sense. Bit like if Kubrick had been replaced on a film project half way thru by John Ford.

I don't know... pirates could easily have spun off from mercenary space/defense contractors (therefore not needing to recoupe any sunk costs of investment)...

In the lawlessness of space they'd be able to take advantage of things... I think it was enough for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy the themes of the movie... This is one of the better father/son dramas in recent years...

@CheekyMonkey said:

I don't know... pirates could easily have spun off from mercenary space/defense contractors (therefore not needing to recoupe any sunk costs of investment)...

In the lawlessness of space they'd be able to take advantage of things... I think it was enough for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy the themes of the movie... This is one of the better father/son dramas in recent years...

If you thought it worked as a father/son drama then that is a good result for you. Personally I thought it was lacking in maturity and understanding and plain common sense. As a working of the old 'cold distant father' trope, the sheer literalism of this movie is almost into self parody.

@acontributor A SciFi writer once said that it was usually better not to try to explain how a future technology worked. The implication being that readers and audiences would make up their own explanations. This works for dramatically necessary things like warp speed in Star Trek, or gravity inside space ships. There is nothing necessary in this movie about space baboons and moon pirates. They are episodic intrusions unrelated to the story being told.

How entertaining one finds a slow motion buggy race on the moon is a matter for the viewer. How believable; likewise. I for example would have no issues whatever with moon pirates or space baboons in something like Hergé's Adventures of Tintin. In a movie that takes itself so seriously, right down to the Latin title, it doesn't work for me.

@acontributor said:

I agree that the movie was bad. I was just offering an explanation about why criminal gangs might be on the moon. If you think about it, it makes sense. Most people aren't going to want to colonize the moon unless they're forced into it. And who better to send to the moon than society's rejects?

One question I asked is why Brad Pitt even had to go to the moon in the first place, or to Mars for that matter. Going to Mars would take months wouldn't it? Couldn't he just send his message to his father from Earth? I mean unless the Earth was on the wrong side of the sun at the time while Mars was not. But if that was the case how is getting to Mars even practical?

This movie is for people who don't like to ask too many questions when they watch Sci-Fi. I felt the same way about Interstellar. Everyone said how great it was while I kept thinking it made no sense.

Respectfully I must disagree with the criminal gangs on the moon making sense. Even if they did colonize the moon with criminals, which also doesn't make sense to me, the movie very clearly shows their 'pirating' to be a high risk and low reward effort. In the movie I believe they lose four moon buggies in their laughable and down right pathetic attempt to capture two moon buggies. The hell are they going to do with them anyways? Eat the aluminium or sell it back to earth? I kind of like this movie because I suppose the movie has something for everyone to point and laugh at, but just off the top of my head even with the space monkeys, the high octane astronaut mars race to the shuttle, the space jump back to the ship with the grate shield, sending 80 year old near death and probably demented geezers to space and the million mile space travel part to me none were as stupid as the moon pirates.

i thought the space buggy chase was pretty cool... it worked, in cinema..

I try to avoid predicting future things because I have lived long enough to learn that most of what experts say is going to happen- doesn't. But because I can't help myself I will venture the following:

Any settlement on the moon will likely follow the same pattern as settlement in Antarctica. Scientific and military bases, the occasional private explorer, with the addition of mining for essential materials like water and oxygen needed on the moon. If piracy makes no sense in Antarctica today, it would make even less sense on the moon in the future.

@CheekyMonkey said:

i thought the space buggy chase was pretty cool... it worked, in cinema..

In what sense? Were audiences actually laughing? Don't get me wrong, I know the movie was successful and I don't begrudge anyone being entertained. But it's moments like these, or when I realise how much money the Kardashians or Ed Sheeran have made, that I start to feel like Arthur Dent when he discovers there is something fundamentally wrong with the Universe. That's not envy or anger or even disappointment. It's bewilderment.

The theatre was empty if I recall correctly, but I did enjoy seeing it on the big screen... I accepted it as a genre trope/element and didn't overthink it...

There was enough in the deeper, emotional themes of the movie to engagge with... To each their own...

I doubt anyone who is a big Kardashian or Ed Sheeran fan would be into Ad Astra... Maybe if they were enamoured with Pitt...

I wasn't suggesting the three things were similar in any regard other than my bewilderment at their popularity. So that really says something about me, not Ad Astra.

'Overthinking' is a tad harsh criticism I think tho. Talking about Clueless for example as tho it really were an adaption of Jane Austen's Emma, would be overthinking things. Complaining about the existence of magic in the Potterverse is overthinking. Expecting a movie or story to have a coherent internal logic is simply thinking. I'm not anti entertainment and I'm not anti space baboon either. In the right movie space baboons and moon pirates would be a hoot.

This movie positions itself in a real, science driven, near future. Apart from the father/son stuff, it makes some ambitious, well meaning and serious claims about ecological destruction. That's why the things mentioned in the OP and later posts are so problematic. They violate the narrative.

Again, good that you enjoyed the movie. That isn't me being patronising and I mean it sincerely. But I do agree with the OP.