About half way through director James Gray’s sixth feature film Ad Astra, I began to find myself thinking, ‘hang on, haven’t I seen this bit before?’ ‘In that other film about space?’ ‘And haven’t I heard this voice over before?’ In that film by Terence Malick about the tree?’
This feeling of déjà vu never quite left me as I ploughed my way through Gray’s self-indulgent space epic/Brad Pitt Oscar vehicle, bitterly disappointed as the film revealed itself to be no more than a style-over-substance space odyssey full of threadbare cliches.
Ad Astra is a film of two halves. One is a visually breath-taking science fiction adventure brimming with seamless visual effects, The other is a tepid father/son melodrama that tries it’s damnedest to drag the rest of the film down to it’s yawn-inducing level. Ad Astra looks poised to kick-start the age old debate of substance over style, and I imagine audiences watching the film will find that which camp they fall in will determine how much they agree with critical opinion. Continue reading
About a year ago, eagle-eyed Jurassic Park fans noticed a strange addition to the franchise’s history. All over the internet, the name Battle at Big Rock was appearing. First in Mattel’s leaked toy-line and then on Universal’s own website.
There are only so many times you can hear about a cinema classic, without giving in to the pressure of watching it. The guilt surrounding your lack of enthusiasm around a movie that appears to have turned the whole world upside down, dragging with it the expectations of film making as we have come to know it, forces you to need to watch something (even if you’re not really that bothered.) This is what happened to me with James Cameron’s Avatar: much to the chagrin of planet Earth…I didn’t like it.
Part of this post is sponsored by 4DX Cinemas. With poignancy and heart on its side, 2017’s 
“Euhuheh” – A quote from me in four separate scenes in 