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Bumpy Road into Stars

A short review of 'Ad Astra'

By Pouria NazemiPublished 4 years ago 15 min read
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Ad Astra, which means into stars in Latin, was a surprising movie for me.

It actually surprised me twice.

The first time was when I realized that such a movie exists.

Somehow, this movie had stayed in my blind spot until the first trailer.

When I watched the first trailer, it seemed exciting. It was showing an astronaut, Brad Pitt, who was working on a high altitude structure, which at the time I had supposed was a space elevator. The list of actors was terrific too—Brad Pitt, Tomy Lee Jones, who was portraying the mysterious father of Brad Pitt's character, and Liv Tylor.

Based on trailer, I thought that the movie was somehow about our contact with intelligence civilizations. I was sold. After a relatively long time, this movie promised an excellent space adventure.

In the year that I was anticipating Lucy in the Sky and Proxima finding out that such a movie was going to cinema definitely was a great surprise.

After the premiere of Ad Astra at the Venice Film Festival, some critics published a very positive review of it and even some of them compare the movie with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which, after watching the film, left me to wonder if these critics have ever seen 2001, A Space Odyssey—or do they just compare everything in space and a little flavour of strangeness to that masterpiece?

These reviews were the confirmation that added to my excitement.

Then I watched the movie.

That was when the second surprise struck me. Why? And How?

Why there are so many things in the movie inconsistent? And how such a project, full of lots of great ideas, turns to this?

Of course that I have a bias toward science. But I usually don't judge movies based on their scientific accuracy. Still, I have to say when I see a film that at least tries to get the science right, I really appreciate it. Especially when they are trying to represent a realistic science—in this case, space—context.

I know that some times as artists, we have no choice but to abandon the technical accuracy to tell our story. But sometimes there are ways to narrate the exact same story by keeping the science accurate.

Probably there was a reason at first that you chose to tell your story in the space setting, so use it.

I don't understand why movies like Ad Astra, with a budget between 80 to 100 million dollars, didn't use scientific advisers.

Some could argue that this lack of accuracy is part of the artistic license. Sure. But when you can address them, and you decide to not, it is more like lazy writing and underestimating your audiences.

I am going to mention a few issues about this movie in the following paragraphs. But maybe I am missing something so please if you think so, let me know below and in the comments.

SPOILER ALERT

First, let's go through the good stuff.

Visually, Ad Astra is an outstanding movie. The movie is also amazingly ambitious and dares to go to places that maybe just a few before it went. There are many landscapes in the film. Earth, the edge of the space, the Moon, Mars, Neptune and interplanetary space.

The story takes you on a journey to different worlds of the solar system, and it is impressive.

The next great thing about this movie is casting of it.

Almost all the actors are great. Notably, Brad Pitt masterfully portrayed a calm and in-control astronaut with the conflicts inside him.

Sometimes, you wonder if he is acting or not. There is a scene that while he tries to be calm, experiencing an internal tension. And he managed to showcase it by moving a muscle above his eye.

Others actors are amazing in their roles.

Besides the casting, the movie has some great and bright ideas. Some of them have the potential to be an independent story and films. Still, unfortunately, they introduce without any reason and left alone without any explanations. Some times it seems that there are a few short films that added in between of the main movie. I really like to know more about them. Don't you want to know about Lunar pirates or rouge space monkey?

What goes wrong with the movie?

The movie starts by emphasizing that the events of the story are happening in the near future.

In this future, we have cities on the Moon, with the capability of hosting tourists. Also, we have bases on Mars and many stations in the interplanetary space and are sending a human expedition to Neptune.

And we built an enormous tower that reaches to the edge of space. So it seems that this future is not really close to us.

Creators of the movie didn't advance the technology based on this landscape.

For example, most of the launchers that we see in the movie are based on chemical fuel. They also are multi-stage rockets which are modelled after Apollo mission and its different modules don't seem reusable. With this kind of space traffic, these launchers will create a massive cloud of space junks around the Earth and the Moon and also financially wouldn't be feasible.

Spacesuits and Lunar rovers are based on the 1960s and 1970s.

Maybe the creators of the movie decided to use these old looking techs, so we have a kind of realistic feeling about it. But the problem is what was sensible in the 1970s wouldn't be practical in, let's say, 2100.

At the beginning of the movie, we see Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) on a very high-altitude structure. At first, I thought that it was a space elevator. It turns out that I was wrong. This antenna was a structure to help humans for the search of the extraterrestrial life. If you ask why we would need such a structure to do this search, the answer is simple. There is no reason at all.

It is correct that Earth's atmosphere blocks part of the electromagnetic window. But it is transparent to the radio wave. Right now, there are too many radio telescopes all around the world, and they are listening to the sky. And some of them explicitly are looking to the sky to find clues of potential extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI Institute is a scientific body dedicated to these searches. Even if we want to observe other regions of the spectrum that blocked by the atmosphere, we can use space telescopes. Telescopes such as Chandra, Campton, Swift, and many others are just a few examples of these observatories. Furthermore, in a future that we colonized the Moon, we definitely will have lots of telescopes in a different part of the spectrum on the far side of the Moon. They can observe the deep space without the interference of atmosphere and other man-made noises.

The sole purpose of this structure in the movie is to show that Brad Pitt falls from it. And if that is the case you could do it by turning it to the space elevator. By doing that not only you keep the visual of falling, but also could say that there are few science stations at the top of the elevator and also solve the problem of multi-stage rockets and the pollutions of them. The space elevator could play the role of a platform for launching f space ships with less fuel.

Later we find out that Major McBride's father (Tommy Lee Jones) was the commander of a scientific expedition to search for aliens. The rational of this mission was that they had to go to the edge of the solar system (in this case, the orbit of Neptune) to conduct a search out the interference of solar winds in the heliosphere.

This doesn't make any sense. The heliosphere is a bubble around the Sun where the solar winds push the interstellar medium aside. It doesn't interfere with any search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And even if it did, The Neptune was not a place to be free of this effect. The heliosphere extended long beyond the orbit of Neptune. Look at the following image. It shows how far beyond the Neptune this bubble spread.

And also, Neptune is one of the worst choices if you wanted to be free from noises. It has a strong magnetic field and also it has the most strange magnetic field in the solar system. The shape and dynamic of this magnetic field puzzled astronomers for many years.

The managers of the project believed that Commander Clifford McBride went rouge.

He apparently had killed the communications with Earth.

He is also probably responsible for a chain reaction of antimatters. These reactions had caused surges of high energy particles toward Earth. And if it continues, it can destroy all the solar system.

This again makes no sense.

If the Lima Project's mother ship used some kind of antimatter drive, then in the case of a leak, as soon as this antimatter become in touch of the matter, both of them will annihilate and produce a large amount of energy that probably destroys the ship, and that is it. There is no chain reaction.

Anyway, they asked Roy McBride to go to Mars via the Moon and use one of their laser-based communication systems in Mars to contact his father. They hope the father will answer to his son, and by doing this, they could find the exact location of him and send a ship with an atomic bomb to destroy it.

We travel with Roy McBride to the Moon. When they land on Moon, we were witnessing a commercial and tourist station. People from all around the world are at this base. It is excellent, but remember no matter that you are on the surface or in a basement of a building on the Moon, you are dealing with gravity about 17 percent of the Earth. Which means while your mass is constant, but if your weight is about 80 Kg on the surface of the Earth, your weight on the Moon will be about only 13.5 Kg. Which means you can't walk around like you are on the Earth. We all have seen how astronauts are walking on the Moon, and it is not hard to show how people are walking on the Moon. But the creators of the movie decided to ignore it.

Our heroes then had to travel to a base on the far side of the Moon to go to Mars. They use lunar-rovers which are precisely the same as 1970 and the Apollo program.

When you have cities and tourists resorts on the Moon, you definitely are advanced your transportation system too. In this part, we are witnessing an exciting chase and conflict between a group of lunar pirates and our heroes. This could be a full story. About why we have pirates there, their operations and I am sure that would be a great movie. But there is almost no explanation about them. And of course, the physics of this chase doesn't work well too.

This scene has almost nothing to do with the story. It looks like a short film which added inside the storyline.

In their way from the Moon to Mars, the crew received a mayday call and decided to go and help the crew of a Norwegian biomedical research space station.

Here is the problem when you are travelling in space with these kinds of rockets—you can't control it like a car and brake anywhere you wanted. There is something that is called orbital mechanics, and you have to follow the rule. And braking is consuming lots of fuel, and if you set your course to Mars, you will have not a lot of extra fuel to spent.

Remember The Martian (Move or the book) how they had to figure out a way to change their position for just a few hundred meters? This is not just a detail. It is fundamental for space travel, and that is why movies and stories like The Martian and The Expanse series are so valuable. Because they pay attention to the basics.

In this space station, they find out that all crew member had died and there is a killer monkey. I have to be honest with you. I love to see a movie or read a story about this station. What happened there and why this monkey became a sole survivor and probably killing machine.

Our hero kills the monkey by depressurizing a module that the monkey was in. Yes, this will kill the monkey but doesn't make it explode. Even Marvel cinematic universe realize dthat being exposed in the space doesn't blow you. More than half a century ago Kubrick showcased it masterfully in his 2001, a Space Odyssey, and illustrated how you can even survive a few seconds exposure of the vacuum of space.

Another error in the story happened when they decide to refuel the same ship that arrived from Moon to mars and send it to Neptune. The journey between Mars to Neptune is not the same as Moon to Mars, and it needs more fuel and more space for stuff that crew would need during this long travel. They need more oxygen, water, food and therefore they will need a bigger ship and launching such a vessel from the surface is the worst idea.

You can have your interplanetary ship parked in orbit and then send an ascending vehicle from Mars surface to the orbit and then transfer your passengers into the main ship.

McBride decided that he has to be in this mission. So with the help of a manager at Mars and using a mars rover goes near the launch pad. They didn't use space suits inside the Mars rover. Which means the cabin is pressurized and have a breathable atmosphere. But then they just open the door and McBride walk out of rover (with his spacesuit on). You can't do that in this way. All pressurized vehicles need to have an airlock. Without the airlock to balance the interior and outside atmosphere, as soon as you open the door, all the pressure of inside among the oxygen will run out. It is not hard to design a double layer door as an airlock.

Our hero then goes inside the tunnel, which is full of liquid water. Yes, Mars has liquid water under the surface but not in contact with the atmosphere. The liquid water couldn't exist on Mars in touch with the atmosphere.

To enter the space ship, Mc bride uses a hatch near the exhaust of the running engine. And as soon as he enters the ship, it lifts off. During lift-off, you will experience a high g pressure. But in this movie, the crew not only doesn't feel that but start to fight and shooting each other.

McBride kills all the crew but even if they didn't die in a shoot out, he actually would kill them as soon as he entered the ship. For a journey that long every gram of mass is matter and they only will bring the necessary supply for the exact number of the crew. Adding one person to the travel without adding enough oxygen, food or water will put all of them in danger and inevitable death treat.

We don't know why they decide to send a human mission to bomb the station. They just could send bomb via unmanned mission. But that is how the story goes.

I skip the part that rational of the trip and encounter between father and son doesn't make sense and just mention three other issues.

First, in a scene when the father and son decided to back to Earth, Father who connected to his son with a rope asked McBrdes to let him go. And when he disconnected the cord, father started to fall toward the Neptune. Once again remember that you are in space and when you are in orbit and when you cut your rope you just stay where you were. It is not like falling from a cliff. It is space.

After this scene, Our hero uses a rotating antenna to back to his ship and uses a metal sheet s a shield to travel through the rings of Neptun. Either the antenna gave the astronaut enough velocity to change its orbit, or it doesn't. If it does (which of course it cant) the speed for changing the orbit is enough that when the small icy objects that made the ring of the Neptune, hit this shield acted like a bullet and destroy it. If it doesn't give enough speed, well he doesn't go anywhere.

And the final act is using the shock wave of atomic explosion (which we still don't know how it supposed to solve any problem) as propulsion. This old idea of using nuclear blast as propulsion system only works on the paper and only and only if the space ship has a deflecting shield. Our space ship doesn't have one, and the result of such action is instant dead.

Space movies usually fall into two categories. The first one encourages exploration and going forward. Movies like The Martian, Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey and so on. The second group try to show us that we have to pay more attention to here and what we already have. Movies like Gravity. Ad Astra belongs to the latter.

I think the main story is about the father and son, their relationship, and how the son should overcome and frees himself from the shadow and name of his father. This is a very old and ancient motif, and there are many ways to tell this story. But if we chose to express it in a space setting then let's at least pretend that we respect the audiences.

Ad Astra has some great visual and lots of fantastic ideas. It tries to pay tribute to many classics like 2001, A Space Odyssey, Solaris and even Apocalypse Now.

It is worth to watch on a big screen, but I wish that It pays some attention not to details but to the basics of its settings.

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About the Creator

Pouria Nazemi

Freelance science journalist based in Montreal, Canada

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