For the week of December 16th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing James Gray's sci-fi drama Ad Astra to Blu-ray. The film uses the contours of a space opera as a grand-scale metaphor for the sins of the father and the ways that we inherit our parents' worst tendencies. In theory, laconic astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, giving his second great performance of 2019) is traveling to the vast reaches of space to try and make contact with his missing father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones, who gives 90% of his performance through screens) and hopefully stop the elder McBride from discharging energy signatures that put Earth at risk. But it becomes clear that with every step in his mission, Roy is burrowing deeper within himself, simultaneously withdrawing from humanity and interrogating the ways that the proud, distant Clifford traumatized Roy. I say, "becomes clear." I should say, "Gray affixes the subtext to the screen in flashing neon." If you've seen any of his previous films, you'll know Gray to be a filmmaker of extraordinary nuance and restraint, which is why I'm still wrestling with his decision to blanket the film in voiceover. I suppose he's paying homage to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, but the voiceover in Ad Astra often scans like Malick-lite. It's a little silly, and frankly, it's unnecessary. Maybe Fox and Gray were worried about people not understanding what Roy was experiencing. Here's the thing about Brad Pitt: he's a movie star, and he's able to convey so much through his eyes, his face, a subtle shift in his body. The pop philosophizing of the voiceover, then, clashes against intergalactic action setpieces that are, ahem, a bit pulpier in their affect. The opening sequence finds Roy on an intergalactic space satellite when the first power surge hits, and the shockwave sends him plummeting down to Earth, twisting through the air like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. He has to travel to the dark side of the moon, and space pirates blast away at his lunar-buggy convoy with lasers. At one point, Roy gets into a zero-G knife fight; at another, he bodysurfs through Neptune's asteroid belt. And I haven't even mentioned the Space Baboons!, who briefly give Ad Astra the gruesome charge of an Alien movie. These action beats are only a few beats removed from the "gee whiz!" silliness of a John Carter novel, and I confess to having trouble every time the film would lurch from somber reflection to space baboons mutilating a guy's face. And yet I found myself held rapt for the vast majority of the film. Gray might make an imperfect film, but he's incapable of making a bad one. Ad Astra offers so much to get lost in, from Hoyte van Hoytema's cavernous cinematography to Max Richter's churning electronica score. Perhaps the most representative scene of Ad Astra, good and bad, occurs right at the midpoint. We've just survived that insane baboon sequence, but then Roy suddenly starts filing a psychiatric report. About the only transition we get from violent monster movie to hushed therapy comes from Roy acknowledging, "the rage in those creatures. I feel the same rage." Only Roy keeps talking, and his voice melts into this heartbreaking acknowledgement of self: how he's scared he's becomes just like his father, how he pushes everyone who will ever love him away as a result, how he's clueless how to keep from hurting himself and those around him. It's as sincere and affecting a declaration of trauma as I've ever seen on film, and it's all the more impactful because there's no way we could have seen it coming. Maybe Gray's onto something. He had to throw us off-balance so we'd be just as surprised by that kind of emotional honesty as Roy is. Touché, Ad Astra.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film is "curiously tamped down, even when it gets to its climax, offering Roy as a virtually emotionless centerpiece who kind of drifts through a number of amazing experiences without having any sizable reactions to them, at least on the surface. There's a subtextual element here which basically boils down to whether or not Clifford McBride is a 'Kurtz' or not (for those not conversant with Heart of Darkness and/or Apocalypse Now, Kurtz was the crazed villain of the piece). But aside from any allusions to Joseph Conrad, it's probably Stanley Kubrick who may seem most evoked in Ad Astra. Gray has the same kind of contemplative quality that Kubrick's science fiction masterpiece offered, and in fact in some of the languid shots of spacecraft floating through a starfield, I half expected to hear either Richard or Joseph Strauss on the soundtrack. Perhaps more importantly, though, the plot trajectories in both films posit the 'evolution' of a focal character who is hardly given over to any kind of histrionic displays, something that can tend to keep the viewer at arm's length at times. If the 'father' in 2001: A Space Odyssey might be thought of as more of an opaque (literally) cosmic Being, in Ad Astra it's personalized. As such, Roy is not 'reborn' as a Starchild a la Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he does finally connect to a deeper if not intrinsically 'higher' version of himself."
Far less confusing is Lionsgate's Rambo: Last Blood, which is one of the year's most disappointing pictures. I am an unapologetic fan of the Rambo franchise. Taken together, the first four films might veer crazily from socially minded character study (the brilliant First Blood to borderline irresponsible splatter feature (2008's hyperviolent Rambo), but they always maintain such a single-minded purpose to entertain. But Last Blood is a whiff by any metric. After the explosive mayhem that ended the last Rambo, anything might feel like a letdown, so I was initially willing to cut Last Blood a little slack for pulling the title character out from the jungles and plunking him onto a quiet farm in Arizona. As the Creed movies have shown, Stallone has grown increasingly interested in taking his most iconic characters and deconstructing them from the constraints of '80s and '90s formula. There's a version of Last Blood that plays almost like Rambo's Unforgiven, where this man of violence struggles with his purpose after realizing there's no one left to kill. Too bad Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick's script isn't interested in anything resembling nuance or depth - the minute we meet Rambo's young ward Gabriela (Yvette Monreal), the clock starts ticking before she gets fridged and sends Rambo onto a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Except not that roaring: it takes a full hour of poky melodrama before Rambo takes up arms again. In a franchise that has had Rambo a) destroy a whole Pacific Northwest town, b) win Vietnam, c) fight alongside the Taliban, and d) nuke a fair chunk of Burma into rubble, this low-grade and boring Charles Bronson stuff is Last Blood's biggest sin. Luckily, Last Blood isn't just boring; it's also racist, as the film largely paints its Latinx cast as either ineffectual victims or savage drug kingpins. If you can make it to the end, Rambo's big showdown against the cartel has some nice splattery surprises, including a Big Bad finishing move designed to rival Rambo's throat-ripping AND machete disembowelment. You could also just rewatch any of the other Rambo and pretend this one doesn't exist. I'm opting for the latter.
Finally, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is putting out Blu-rays for three catalog titles: Look Who's Talking, The Cable Guy, and the 2001 David Mamet caper Heist. The best of the bunch is definitely The Cable Guy, writer/director Ben Stiller's savage farce about the battle of wills between a lonely schlub (Matthew Broderick) and an increasingly unhinged cable technician (Jim Carrey). Critics had their knives pre-sharpened for this one back in 1996; sight unseen, the film encountered a hostile reception, largely because Carrey netted $20 million for the title role (as Roger Ebert famously groused, "black comedy is not what you pay someone $20 million to do"). But Carrey is exceptional in the part, all leering, smarmy menace. As sharp as Stiller's other satirical targets are (he casts himself as, essentially, the Menendez Brothers so he can turn the doomed pair into nighttime TV stars), Carrey's beyond unctuous melding of pathological unease and pop-culture ephemera does so much to convey the destructive results of our media obsessions. But the most surprising film might be Look Who's Talking, which should be intolerable. In theory, it's the worst kind of high-concept twaddle: we get to hear the inner thoughts of a newborn baby (voiced by Bruce Willis, of all people) witnessing the will-they-or-won't-they chemistry between his single mother (Kirstie Alley) and a charmingly doofy pilot (John Travolta). Except the film just kinda...works, and it remains inexplicably charming. Alley and Travolta make a great pair (this is still one of Travolta's biggest box-office hits), and the baby conceit never grates on us. That leaves Heist, which takes the prize for Biggest Letdown. It isn't bad - second-tier Mamet is still fine, especially when he's letting a bunch of hyper-verbal scumbags plan a multi-million-dollar bullion robbery. However, given the film's overwhelmingly strong pedigree (Mamet writes/directs; it stars Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, and Patti Lupone), it should be a whole lot better than fine, and it isn't.