Tag Archives: ‘Interstellar’

Movie review: ‘Ad Astra’ blasts off strong but veers off course

“Ad Astra” (PG-13)

Most – but not all – systems are go for “Ad Astra,” writer-director James Gray’s ambitious space drama that blasts off in spectacular fashion but desperately spins out of control at the end. It’s no doubt a spectacular film from an audio-visual standpoint, and the doomsday story line is quite engaging with Brad Pitt in the lead. But as the film nears the end of its two-hour star trek, the plot becomes jumbled and the endgame for the key narrative disappoints.


AUDIO: Hear Tim’s review of “Ad Astra” with Tom Barnard on “The KQ Morning Show” on KQRS-FM. Segment is brought to you by  Michael Bryant and Bradshaw & Bryant.

Set in the not-too-distant future, Pitt stars Roy McBride, a highly disciplined but emotionally distant astronaut in a government military organization called U.S. Space Command. Space exploration has advanced significantly in Roy’s lifetime, to the point where his father, Space Command’s top dog Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), embarked on The Lima Project, a mission to explore the solar system for extraterrestrial life that began when Roy was just a boy. But 16 years into the mission, Clifford disappeared near Neptune.

Thirty years after his father’s disappearance, the adult Roy is working on a mission just above Earth when a sudden electrical storm wreaks havoc on a towering space antenna he is working on, causing death to not only some of his colleagues, but massive fatalities all over the planet. With 40,000 people dead and the entirety of Earth’s population in peril as the electrical storm moves closer, Roy is recruited to embark on an interplanetary mission to contact Neptune, where Space Command believes the phenomena is originating from. Making more matters complicated, Roy’s superiors believe that his father is still alive and may have something to do with the deadly phenomena, and believe the younger McBride may be the only astronaut capable of effectively communicating with him in a bid to stave off the inevitable.

As far as space dramas go, “Ad Astra” feels much more like Christopher Nolan’s 2014 intergalatic epic “Interstellar” than it does the classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” although there’s no question that “Ad Astra” has a vibe closer to the esoteric Stanley Kubrick film. The thing is, as advanced, technologically, as “2001” and “Interstellar” were at the times of their respective releases, the visual effects seem to have taken an even bigger leap forward as Roy’s ship blasts off, first to a fully operational base on moon before heading to a similarly advanced base on Mars, where Roy is expected to make contact with his father. Thanks to a brilliant IMAX presentation of the film, not only do you feel like you’re strapped into the spaceship with Pitt, you can literally feels the rumbling of the rockets underneath your seat as he takes orbit.

While “Ad Astra” is effectively a story about the strained relationship and hopeful reconciliation between a father and a son, the film, doesn’t wallow entirely in the film’s heady narrative. The action scenes are spectacular, especially when its revealed that colonization is so advanced on the moon that, thanks to the commercialism of space travel, corruption and crime have taken a foothold on the moon, as space pirates attempt to hijack Roy and his crew in a thrilling space buggy chase sequence on the lunar surface. The story also takes some unexpected twists and turns once Roy finds his way to Mars and meets a scientist (Ruth Negga) who reveals a dark secret about The Lima Project.

Photo: 20th Century Fox/Disney

As much as “Ad Astra” has going for it throughout the movie, it feels discombobulated and ultimately a bit dull as it lumbers toward its ending. Plus, without giving too much away, the final act feels like a cheat as it relates to the all the hoops Roy had to jump through to begin the mission. That’s not to take away from Pitt’s acting, as he delivers yet another solid performance. But while industry tastemakers and fans are already chanting for a Best Actor nomination for Pitt, the performance comes nothing close to his smaller, but far more memorable turn in Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to 1969 Tinseltown, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” a couple months back.

While “Ad Astra” is clearly Pitt’s movie, Jones no doubt has a presence, albeit a small one in the film. One thing’s for certain: Gray gave Pitt, Jones, Negga and Donald Sutherland (who appears in a small turn as Clifford’s former astronaut colleague) far more material to work with than Liv Tyler, who despite being prominently featured in the film’s trailers, barely appears in a stereotypical role as Roy’s resentful wife, who is left out in the cold because of her husband’s vacant emotions.

Lammometer: 7 (out of 10)

Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for “The KQ92 Morning Show,”  WCCO Radio, WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere. On TV, Tim has made hundreds of guest appearances on “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC).

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Movie review: Laughable ‘Serenity’ first major movie mistake of 2019

The first movie misfire of 2019 is here with “Serenity,” an embarrassingly bad sci-fi tinged mystery that completely squanders the talents of a top-notch ensemble cast including Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou and Diane Lane.

The set-up seems simple enough. McConaughey plays Baker Dill, an Iraq War veteran struggling to make ends meet as a tuna fisherman off the coastal waters of Florida. His fortunes appear to change, however, when his ex-wife, Karen (Hathaway) turns up on his boat one day with a proposal to kill her new husband, Frank (Jason Clarke), a sadistic drunkard with criminal connections. Even though he’s offered $10 million to do the deed, Baker is hesitant to carry out the task until he finds out the vicious contempt Frank holds for his son with Karen.


AUDIO: Listen to Tim’s review of “Serenity” with Tom Barnard on “The KQ Morning Show.” The segment begins at 3-minute mark.

The strange thing about “Serenity” is that it begins as a potboiler mystery tale, but then takes a hard-left turn into an alternate reality that includes wayward characters who make little sense, as well as revealing scene where McConaughey taking a skinny dip for apparently no other reason than show audiences to show off his bare backside.

Once it becomes clear the direction in which “Serenity” is headed, the film feels like no more than an inept attempt to capture the mysterious vibe of a “Black Mirror” episode – specifically the show’s acclaimed “U.S.S. Callister” tale – but the end result doesn’t even come remotely close. The tone is bizarre, the writing is bad and the acting by Hathaway and McConaughey is especially hideous (in sharp contrast to their polished performances opposite each other in Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”).

In the end, “Serenity” is the perfect example of how actors – even Oscar winners – can’t act their ways out of bad scripts. Instead, McConaughey and Hathaway have earned the distinction of being the first two “worst acting” front-runners vying for next year’s Razzies.

Lammometer: 2.5 (out of 10)


AUDIO: Tim reviews “Serenity” with Paul Douglas on “Paul & Jordana” on WCCO-AM. The segment begins at the 11-minute mark.

Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO Radio, WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.

Copyright 2019 DirectConversations.com

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Movie review: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ lost in space

“A Wrinkle in Time” (PG)

There’s a lot of plot that needs to be ironed out in Disney’s new big-budget adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic 1962 children’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time,” and despite the well-intentioned efforts of director Ava DuVernay, the film struggles to find a way to come together in a cohesive manner.

Storm Reid stars as Meg Murry, the young daughter of scientists Alex and Kate Murry (Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who has clearly inherited her father’s expansive knowledge of astrophysics. Alex’s obsession, however, with the space-time continuum leads to his mysterious disappearance, plunging Meg into four-year funk that suddenly changes when three celestial beings, Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) turn up in her backyard with the promising information about the location of her father.

Accompanied by her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and friend Calvin (Levi Miller), Meg embarks with the otherworldly beings on fantastical trek that transcends the boundaries of space and time. The voyage leads them to different planets and ultimately, the dark world known as The It that is holding Alex captive, where she must use her mind to defeat evil if her father is ever to be freed.

There’s no question that “A Wrinkle in Time” is stunning piece of work from a visual standpoint, as DuVernay does her best to describe L’Engle’s intricately detailed source material. But where the visuals excel the narrative falters, where the discussion of tesseracts (“tessering” is the term they use for traveling) and quantum physics quickly becomes confused and offers no solutions to move the plot forward in meaningful and sensible way.

Instead, the film takes on bizarre if not creepy tones at times, and even without the weirdness, the film is way too cerebral for its intended kid audience (if not the adults accompanying them). The ambitious concept worked wonders for Christopher Nolan with “Interstellar,” but as for “A Wrinkle in Time,” DuVernay is lost in space.

Lammometer: 5 (out of 10)

Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO-AM, WJON-AM, 103.7-FM The Loon, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.

Copyright 2018 DirectConversations.com

Movie review: ‘Arrival’ fascinating, but underwhelming

Click audio player to hear Tim’s review of “Arrival” on “The KQ Morning Show” with Tom Barnard.

“Arrival” (PG-13)

The space alien genre gets a seemingly new twist in “Arrival,” a thinking person’s sci-fi thriller that ultimately is more about questions of humanity than it is the otherworldly beings that initiate first contact.  But while “Arrival”  feels fresh in comparison to several alien thrillers recent years – it’s about aliens that invade, but don’t attack – it ultimately comes off like a smattering of similar films.

In fact, it doesn’t take long to realize the touchstones of “Arrival” seem to borrow from the plot points of “District 9” (which features hovering ships), “Gravity” (about a protagonist dealing with loss), “Contact” (about a scientist decoding alien messages), “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (about aliens warnings to Earthlings) and “Interstellar” (about the transcendence of space and time).

That’s not to say that “Arrival” isn’t fascinating and thought-provoking. It just can’t seem to get over the hump to approach the greatness of any of its equally-smart predecessors.

Amy Adams is brilliant as Dr. Louise Banks, an expert linguistics professor, who, along with and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), is recruited by a military colonel (Forrest Whittaker) to attempt to communicate with the beings in an alien spaceship that lands in Montana. A saucer-shaped ship that appears to be levitating sideways, it’s one of 12 massive vessels hovering over different parts of the world that gives no clear indication of its intentions.

Louise’s task is to decode symbols that the aliens are seemingly communicating with, trying to figure out why they are here and what they want; and Ian wants to figure out where they came from and how they got here. The problem is the messages of the beings – dubbed “heptapods” (they resemble octopuses, but are one leg short) – are so complex that Louise and Ian may not have enough time to stave off a festering global war. It turns out that countries like China and Russia are perceiving the heptapods as a threat, and an attack on the ships is imminent.

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“Arrival” not surprisingly arrives just in time for awards season, and thanks to the brooding tone and atmosphere set by gifted director Denis Villenueve (“Prisoners,” “Sicario”), the film manages to be cerebral without being pretentious. From the very first frame, Villenueve masterfully constructs a plot of misdirection, which ultimately results in one of the most satisfying payoffs on the big screen this year.

The problem is, up until the big reveal in the film’s third act, “Arrival” plods along and may feel like a bait and switch to moviegoers expecting much more based on the film’s tantalizing trailers. In the end, “Arrival” comes off as a studio-backed sci-fi art-house movie that doesn’t deliver any of the sorts of scenes moviegoers associate with the genre. On one hand, the less is more approach is completely welcome for those pining for originality; but on the other, the film just feels too uneventful running up to the unexpected, hard-hitting climax. In the end, “Arrival” is satisfying, but ultimately underwhelming.

Lammometer: 6 (out of 10)

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