Remember Men in Black: International? That also came out this year. And yet I have never felt any compulsion to write about those movies.
Why? Because they are bad movies. And bad is, well, bad. But bad is not boring. Ad Astra takes the cake as the worst movie of the year because it gave me the dullest viewing experience of 2019.
We are talking about an epic-scale science fiction film that follows an astronaut who must traverse the vastness of space to find an old man who intends to destroy the solar system. This is the same movie that features a high-speed chase on the freakin’ moon. And yet I could barely keep my eyes open. Two things happened in Ad Astra. Brad Pitt’s character went to space. And then Brad Pitt’s character came back home.
Nothing of consequence happens in between, unless you count the dozens of minutes we spend watching Pitt’s character (I refuse to recollect his name) as he monologues in a soft, sleep-inducing tone.
I do not remember the last time I left the cinema thinking, “What did I just watch?” Ad Astra blew my mind in the worst way possible. And more than a week later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the idea that a movie about space travel could be so tedious.
Never has a movie with such high stakes been so drab. This was the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. And yet reviewers online have the audacity to call this “Quite a trip”.
What trip? Where is this trip that somehow went over my head?
How was this movie even greenlit? Which uninspired studio executive read this script and then decided that Ad Astra would be a worthwhile financial investment?
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