Firstly I absolutely LOVED writing this - only because of the person who came on here to complain these little ditties were too long. I am going to use the word count in full every time from now on. It made me laugh so much. I mean who cares what I write?!

First Man, The First (TV), Interstellar, even Moon and dropping back further Solaris, The Right Stuff these and many more are the extended and distant family of Ad Astra. Unfortunately when your family is as interesting and as compelling as these movies then you are already standing in some particularly big and dark shadows and there needs to be a lot in you to get out into the light.

Ad Astra tries hard, it really tries hard. After all it has Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, although he now looks craggy enough to be a bonafide cliff face and throws in Donald Sutherland as the world’s oldest security detail plus a fleeting Liv Tyler because, well because it can I think?

With the unlimited potential of near-future space-travel and indeed colonisation at their feet the director/writers came up with a singularly strange and somehow uninvolving tale. Pitt is just a future Neil Armstrong, so dedicated, so single-minded, he bombs his wife out and then has to go on a frankly unlikely and long-winded trip/adventure to see his long-lost and feared dead father.

I’m not a science expert I was more on the art side of the coin at school so I do not profess to know the ins and outs of space travel and the mathematics and the physics involved but saying this even I could see the silliness inherent in the story.

Visuals of the huge antenna on the edge of space over the Earth was great, the terrible power surge and the ultimate investigation into it was the high point. From then on the trip was downhill. Much like Harrison Ford in the first cinematic outing of Blade Runner I was not a fan of the voiceover and to be honest, either make an audiobook or make a film. For a serious, adult, science-future film the logic-busting moments far outweighed any acting or visual thrills.

Without listing them there are some very silly moments. Do you know what the makers annoyed me with them, so here are a few.

The moment you have to travel to Mars to send a message to Neptune means that technology has gone backward in the future. The sneaking aboard the ship to Neptune in particular seemed to have been written and plotted by an over-excitable twelve-year-old that had a lot of sugary snacks. The hugely implausible incident that was there purely to give Brad Pitt an action hero moment later was frankly pathetic and insulting. The mystery of the power-surge was not explained and Tommy Lee Jones’ motivations seemed extreme to say the least. Without trying to sound superior or clever there was much on the screen that was somewhat childish.

The casting of the movie was strange, honestly tell me why Liv Tyler and Donald Sutherland were in the film and it was criminal to use Ruth Negga so briefly and then somehow make her look as if she had wandered in from another film set, she looked pissed-off through most of her scenes, hopefully it was acting but I would not be surprised if it is how she actually felt. There were some very poor supporting actors during the run time and if anyone can’t spot the worst one let’s just say computers should have replaced receptionists on the moon.

Now some very clever types will tell you this is not actually a science-fiction tale but a story of loss, redemption, regret and complicated dynamic behind driven people, well macho-men actually, and the never-ending conflict and confusion between fathers and their sons. All very good and actually not the first time and filmmaker has used a specific genre as a suit of clothes for the real story they want to take. Sorry but that is no excuse to ignore widely known science and facts and more or less abandon logic to drive home your story. In my view that is very lazy indeed.

All in all Ad Astra was a mess with just a few good moments. Science-fiction may seem to many to not be a serious topic and for nerds and kids but Ad Astra just shows how difficult it is. There was not even any monsters or aliens in this.

Watch the TV show The First at least the music is more atmospheric and exciting than this film.

I was actually looking forward to this film and felt let down by this poor lazy effort.