Movies

I'm a space buff, I have higher tolerance for a slow pace "in space" than most. I liked it.

Among the things I liked about it are:

The plausibility. It's an "are we alone out here?" movie, without aliens from an extra-solar world dropping by to conquer, study, educate, colonize, exterminate, or steal from us. Which to me reflects the reality of our part of this galaxy much more than alien-visitor movies do. I very much doubt living things travel between stars... at least, not between stars that aren't packed closely together. If we are EVER able to get a manned spacecraft up to, oh, 5% of light speed (and that's unlikely), we MIGHT send humans on a 100-year one-way trip to the star nearest to us. But I'm a doubter. (And wormholes are just theoretical. We have no indication they exist, and if they did, how would anyone control where they go?)

A permanently manned space station on Mars? Maybe, someday. But life there would be difficult, psychologically oppressive... and just really hard and grim once the novelty wore off. I felt Ad Astra got the overall tone of that pretty well.

Pirates preying on inhabitants on the moon? Um... okay.

Maybe we will achieve a lot of what's in Ad Astra. It will be no time real soon, but a couple hundred years from now, maybe?

I liked the depiction of any astronaut getting out on the far side of Neptune. That was pretty mind-bending right there, if one sort of grasps the challenges of space travel.

Ad Astra's overall question was, so where IS everybody else... the other intelligent life? And about how we damn well better appreciate and preserve our little habitat, Earth.

My own thoughts on extrasolar life is it is pretty common in the universe... but as one-celled life. And multicellular, but still far short of intelligent life. It's very possible that intelligent life might be very rare... that it took a tremendous amount of good luck for life on Earth to have lasted this long and especially for our species to have resulted from evolution. (Big brains burn a lot of fuel... notice the millions of successful species that have done quite well and lasted much longer than us without one.) There might well be no other intelligent life at all existing, presently (it might have arisen but already died), very close to us... "close" in interstellar terms.

Ad Astra is beautiful to watch, depicts plausible (in most ways) space exploration, and is thought-provoking, but is contemplative and not going to suit everyone's tastes.

I'm glad there are enough space travel movies made now, that we're able to have the diversity that allows for an Ad Astra.