“To the Stars”: Anti-Cosmic “Apocalypse Today”
The release of each new film “about space” is both pleasing and unnerving - it is far from always possible to tell a believable or even just an interesting story in space surroundings. And Ad Astra trailers were intriguing - skirmishes with pirates, frantic monkeys and maneuvers against the background of some explosions gave hope for a bright flight of fantasy. What did James Gray do?
Contrary to the name, the film is still not about space. Planets, rockets, orbital stations and more - just an entourage to the story of a son who lost his father. If the action was transferred, for example, to a steampunk environment, replacing the rocket with an airship, and the lunar rovers with steam locomotives, in my opinion, the picture would only have won, because Gray treats astronautics carelessly (contrary to statements about the intention to make “the most realistic film about space "), And the film" To the Stars "very weakly corresponds to real physics with ballistics.
And it all starts very well - the main character Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is positioned as a person with steel nerves, reads out “psychological testing”, evoking associations with the oaths from the beginning of the film “The Andromeda Nebula” and the litany against fear from “Dune”. And when a catastrophe occurs on the International Space Antenna (a cyclopean structure that goes into the stratosphere and is obviously used to search for an alien mind), Roy behaves very believably and professionally, trying to save not only his life, but also his colleagues. Unless he plans to move away from the area of the debris fall and opens the parachute too early. But then the strange begins.
Imagine that you are watching a movie in which the hero makes a routine transatlantic flight. But for this, he does not sit in the liner now familiar, but in a biplane made of wood and fabric. At the same time, for some reason, there is a railway compartment with all the surroundings in the biplane. Is it weird? About the same bewilderment is the scene of a flight to the moon. According to the plot, mankind is successfully mastering the solar system, there are several large bases on the moon and even a permanent settlement on Mars. However, there are no traces of new technologies that would allow this to be done. Our hero goes to the moon on a good old chemical rocket, which in our harsh reality carries no more than 5% of the payload from the starting weight and does not allow anything to be built on the moon more than the visited scientific station. We are deliberately shown the surroundings of modern air travel, saying that flying to the moon is a routine matter, but it looks wild - if you have a small command module flying from a huge rocket to the lunar base, the stewardess, for example, becomes completely unacceptable luxury.
Of course, I can only rejoice at the film crew who studied photo and video documents of the history of astronautics, but I dare to assure that in the 21st century no one will use the Apollo museum cabinets to check the spacesuits before the flight.
Trailer frame
Stuart Rusa is preparing for the start of Apollo 14
Rovers, by the way, are also taken from the Apollo program. At the same time, the cinema ones copy the historical construction completely thoughtlessly, not taking into account the fact that the historical rovers were folding in order to fit in the small compartment of the lunar module, and in the presence of a base on the moon, more convenient structures can be realized.
A separate portion of feispalms is delivered by moon pirates. History shows that piracy requires two conditions: uncontrolled space and the easy availability of funds for piracy. Accordingly, for pirates to appear on the moon, it is required that the spacesuit, rover, lunar base and weapons can be made literally “on the knee”, and no one was watching what was happening on the surface of our satellite. And even if we discard all of the above, the scene still remains implausible - a serious military organization in an unsafe area would equip an adequately armed and / or covered convoy. In any case, the military detachment as a target does not make sense to the pirates - there is no valuable booty, and the risk is extremely high. As a matter of fact, the film itself shows the absurdity of the concept, because the result of the skirmish is only a few corpses and broken equipment.
In the scene of the appearance of the Cepheus interplanetary ship, I had a hope that they would show us, for example, an electromagnetic catapult, which in the same future will have a place on the Moon, but, alas, the ship starts on standard chemical engines. In flight, something similar to ionic or plasma is used, but there is not enough energy from solar panels for serious maneuvers, and we do not see radiators that should have been in the presence of a reactor. Nevertheless, in some magical way, the flight time is reduced - several weeks from the moon to Mars and a couple of months to Neptune require orders of magnitude more efficient engines - in reality, using modern technologies, the flight Earth - Mars takes six months. A separate note of meaninglessness - parking lights on solar panels. Who are they honking? The aliens?
I could withstand the scene with the mad monkey only because the switch in my head was in the “frivolous” position. There is a gorilla costume among other things on the International Space Station, and in 2016 astronaut Scott Kelly posted a comic video of him chasing after the English astronaut Tim Peak. It was at least funny. Alas, in "To the Stars," the scene causes exclusively Spanish shame. Yes, ballistics is also against “slowing down along the way”, and yes, the scene looks like a fastened action “to be”. And after such nonsense, I don’t even want to talk about the unrealistic nature of the emergency landing on Mars.
Even before going to the cinema, I thought that the plot is a bit like “Apocalypse today” - and there and there movement to some dangerous goal. By the time of the scene with the monkey, suspicion had grown into confidence - both films related a journey through absurd spaces and situations to a mentally ill and dangerous person. And the comparison is not in favor of “To the Stars” - it is difficult to call the film about the Vietnam War funny, but “Apocalypse Today” is definitely brighter, livelier and more interesting. In general, only Brad Pitt is present on the screen, all secondary characters appear faceless mannequins and disappear after a few minutes. Despite the fact that the “Martian” or “Moon 2112” manages to tell a cool cosmic story with one actor, occupying an even larger proportion of the screen space.
Another plot situation shows how much war in space differs from everyday ideas about it. If you are faced with the task of destroying an orbital station, it is not necessary to carry a nuclear bomb, so that when docked, reload it on the target and detonate by timer. It is enough to go into orbit, which will intersect with the target area (for weeks of flight and millions of kilometers to the target, this requires a very small amount of fuel) and drop not even rockets, but minimally maneuvering satellites without explosives at all. A swarm of cubsats loaded with metal blanks can reliably hit a target at many points at once, and energy comparable to a nuclear explosion will be released at the moment of a collision at a counter speed of several kilometers per second.
Parking on the other side of the rings does not make sense, and flying in a spacesuit does not take into account that the main problem is to aim precisely to cross the target’s orbit at the required time (no, space is not a big aquarium where you can push off and swim straight to the target). The lion's share of the drama would disappear if someone guessed to tie a small ship to the handrails that are clearly visible. But the idea of using a nuclear explosion to accelerate is not entirely fantastic. Yes, in the version in which it was shown, it would hardly have turned out something sensible, but in the history of astronautics there were projects of ships on a pulsed nuclear engine.
The drama of the relationship between the lost and the met father and son is not really shown, so the culmination of the picture looks pale, and the dialogues are implausible. But finally, we get to a somewhat meaningful layer. Humanity in the universe “To the stars” is much stronger than ours is interested in extraterrestrial life and devotes much more resources to its search. Alas, such an important thing for the topic as the Drake equation is called only once (at least in the Russian translation) and cannot be explained in any way. I am referring the reader who is hungry for details to the LongRid “Swan, Cancer, and Pike as a Solution to the Fermi Paradox,” I will say briefly here. The Drake equation is a formula showing the estimated number of people who want to establish contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Its problem is that the values of many variables can only be set according to personal taste, without serious scientific confirmation. And if studies of exoplanets now already say that the Earth is more of an ordinary planet than unique, then science does not name the probability of life on an earth-like planet, and you can choose the value that you like. And the option that humanity is the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy is quite possible. But this beautiful problem is shown completely lapidary in the style of the rhyme "McBride flew in space, never seen life," and from this the suffering of the heroes cannot be separated.
The end of the film paradoxically brightens up the emptiness of wandering around the solar system. At the very beginning, I mentally resented the hero, who was lonely in his solitude against the background of the family astronauts of my beloved Apollo 13. The last frames fix this a bit. But the final message turns out to be paradoxical - “To the Stars”, it turns out, is an anti-space film. He almost directly tells us: "man and humanity are alone, joy is only in his neighbor on earth." And the slogan of the film would be to make "the main thing - on Earth" from the "Interns" of the Strugatsky brothers. But the brothers showed perfectly why we need space, literally in the same book! The “Death Planetics" on Einomia, exploding asteroids in the name of Einstein's theory of relativity, are still at an unattainable semantic height relative to "To the Stars" despite the book's nearly sixty-year-old age. And I don’t even remember the wonderful pathos of space exploration from the "Country of the crimson clouds." You can combine “friendship, love and work” with the profession of an astronaut, without becoming a cracker in the style of the hero Brad Pitt, this is not an insoluble contradiction.
As a result, “To the Stars” makes a mixed impression. Adventures and outer space are shown for the sake of entourage, the characters are pale, a good issue has been raised, but it has not been able to really reveal. And already several people told me that they almost fell asleep in the middle of the picture. At Rotten Tomatoes, there is already the usual difference in the ratings of critics (83%) and audience (42%). But if you like the arthouse, then “To the Stars” can come up, despite the budget and shootings, the picture gives the impression of an auteur movie.
I express gratitude to the Rodina Cinema and personally to Milla Timasheva for the invitation.
Contrary to the name, the film is still not about space. Planets, rockets, orbital stations and more - just an entourage to the story of a son who lost his father. If the action was transferred, for example, to a steampunk environment, replacing the rocket with an airship, and the lunar rovers with steam locomotives, in my opinion, the picture would only have won, because Gray treats astronautics carelessly (contrary to statements about the intention to make “the most realistic film about space "), And the film" To the Stars "very weakly corresponds to real physics with ballistics.
And it all starts very well - the main character Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is positioned as a person with steel nerves, reads out “psychological testing”, evoking associations with the oaths from the beginning of the film “The Andromeda Nebula” and the litany against fear from “Dune”. And when a catastrophe occurs on the International Space Antenna (a cyclopean structure that goes into the stratosphere and is obviously used to search for an alien mind), Roy behaves very believably and professionally, trying to save not only his life, but also his colleagues. Unless he plans to move away from the area of the debris fall and opens the parachute too early. But then the strange begins.
Imagine that you are watching a movie in which the hero makes a routine transatlantic flight. But for this, he does not sit in the liner now familiar, but in a biplane made of wood and fabric. At the same time, for some reason, there is a railway compartment with all the surroundings in the biplane. Is it weird? About the same bewilderment is the scene of a flight to the moon. According to the plot, mankind is successfully mastering the solar system, there are several large bases on the moon and even a permanent settlement on Mars. However, there are no traces of new technologies that would allow this to be done. Our hero goes to the moon on a good old chemical rocket, which in our harsh reality carries no more than 5% of the payload from the starting weight and does not allow anything to be built on the moon more than the visited scientific station. We are deliberately shown the surroundings of modern air travel, saying that flying to the moon is a routine matter, but it looks wild - if you have a small command module flying from a huge rocket to the lunar base, the stewardess, for example, becomes completely unacceptable luxury.
Of course, I can only rejoice at the film crew who studied photo and video documents of the history of astronautics, but I dare to assure that in the 21st century no one will use the Apollo museum cabinets to check the spacesuits before the flight.
Trailer frame
Stuart Rusa is preparing for the start of Apollo 14
Rovers, by the way, are also taken from the Apollo program. At the same time, the cinema ones copy the historical construction completely thoughtlessly, not taking into account the fact that the historical rovers were folding in order to fit in the small compartment of the lunar module, and in the presence of a base on the moon, more convenient structures can be realized.
A separate portion of feispalms is delivered by moon pirates. History shows that piracy requires two conditions: uncontrolled space and the easy availability of funds for piracy. Accordingly, for pirates to appear on the moon, it is required that the spacesuit, rover, lunar base and weapons can be made literally “on the knee”, and no one was watching what was happening on the surface of our satellite. And even if we discard all of the above, the scene still remains implausible - a serious military organization in an unsafe area would equip an adequately armed and / or covered convoy. In any case, the military detachment as a target does not make sense to the pirates - there is no valuable booty, and the risk is extremely high. As a matter of fact, the film itself shows the absurdity of the concept, because the result of the skirmish is only a few corpses and broken equipment.
In the scene of the appearance of the Cepheus interplanetary ship, I had a hope that they would show us, for example, an electromagnetic catapult, which in the same future will have a place on the Moon, but, alas, the ship starts on standard chemical engines. In flight, something similar to ionic or plasma is used, but there is not enough energy from solar panels for serious maneuvers, and we do not see radiators that should have been in the presence of a reactor. Nevertheless, in some magical way, the flight time is reduced - several weeks from the moon to Mars and a couple of months to Neptune require orders of magnitude more efficient engines - in reality, using modern technologies, the flight Earth - Mars takes six months. A separate note of meaninglessness - parking lights on solar panels. Who are they honking? The aliens?
I could withstand the scene with the mad monkey only because the switch in my head was in the “frivolous” position. There is a gorilla costume among other things on the International Space Station, and in 2016 astronaut Scott Kelly posted a comic video of him chasing after the English astronaut Tim Peak. It was at least funny. Alas, in "To the Stars," the scene causes exclusively Spanish shame. Yes, ballistics is also against “slowing down along the way”, and yes, the scene looks like a fastened action “to be”. And after such nonsense, I don’t even want to talk about the unrealistic nature of the emergency landing on Mars.
Even before going to the cinema, I thought that the plot is a bit like “Apocalypse today” - and there and there movement to some dangerous goal. By the time of the scene with the monkey, suspicion had grown into confidence - both films related a journey through absurd spaces and situations to a mentally ill and dangerous person. And the comparison is not in favor of “To the Stars” - it is difficult to call the film about the Vietnam War funny, but “Apocalypse Today” is definitely brighter, livelier and more interesting. In general, only Brad Pitt is present on the screen, all secondary characters appear faceless mannequins and disappear after a few minutes. Despite the fact that the “Martian” or “Moon 2112” manages to tell a cool cosmic story with one actor, occupying an even larger proportion of the screen space.
Another plot situation shows how much war in space differs from everyday ideas about it. If you are faced with the task of destroying an orbital station, it is not necessary to carry a nuclear bomb, so that when docked, reload it on the target and detonate by timer. It is enough to go into orbit, which will intersect with the target area (for weeks of flight and millions of kilometers to the target, this requires a very small amount of fuel) and drop not even rockets, but minimally maneuvering satellites without explosives at all. A swarm of cubsats loaded with metal blanks can reliably hit a target at many points at once, and energy comparable to a nuclear explosion will be released at the moment of a collision at a counter speed of several kilometers per second.
Parking on the other side of the rings does not make sense, and flying in a spacesuit does not take into account that the main problem is to aim precisely to cross the target’s orbit at the required time (no, space is not a big aquarium where you can push off and swim straight to the target). The lion's share of the drama would disappear if someone guessed to tie a small ship to the handrails that are clearly visible. But the idea of using a nuclear explosion to accelerate is not entirely fantastic. Yes, in the version in which it was shown, it would hardly have turned out something sensible, but in the history of astronautics there were projects of ships on a pulsed nuclear engine.
The drama of the relationship between the lost and the met father and son is not really shown, so the culmination of the picture looks pale, and the dialogues are implausible. But finally, we get to a somewhat meaningful layer. Humanity in the universe “To the stars” is much stronger than ours is interested in extraterrestrial life and devotes much more resources to its search. Alas, such an important thing for the topic as the Drake equation is called only once (at least in the Russian translation) and cannot be explained in any way. I am referring the reader who is hungry for details to the LongRid “Swan, Cancer, and Pike as a Solution to the Fermi Paradox,” I will say briefly here. The Drake equation is a formula showing the estimated number of people who want to establish contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Its problem is that the values of many variables can only be set according to personal taste, without serious scientific confirmation. And if studies of exoplanets now already say that the Earth is more of an ordinary planet than unique, then science does not name the probability of life on an earth-like planet, and you can choose the value that you like. And the option that humanity is the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy is quite possible. But this beautiful problem is shown completely lapidary in the style of the rhyme "McBride flew in space, never seen life," and from this the suffering of the heroes cannot be separated.
The end of the film paradoxically brightens up the emptiness of wandering around the solar system. At the very beginning, I mentally resented the hero, who was lonely in his solitude against the background of the family astronauts of my beloved Apollo 13. The last frames fix this a bit. But the final message turns out to be paradoxical - “To the Stars”, it turns out, is an anti-space film. He almost directly tells us: "man and humanity are alone, joy is only in his neighbor on earth." And the slogan of the film would be to make "the main thing - on Earth" from the "Interns" of the Strugatsky brothers. But the brothers showed perfectly why we need space, literally in the same book! The “Death Planetics" on Einomia, exploding asteroids in the name of Einstein's theory of relativity, are still at an unattainable semantic height relative to "To the Stars" despite the book's nearly sixty-year-old age. And I don’t even remember the wonderful pathos of space exploration from the "Country of the crimson clouds." You can combine “friendship, love and work” with the profession of an astronaut, without becoming a cracker in the style of the hero Brad Pitt, this is not an insoluble contradiction.
As a result, “To the Stars” makes a mixed impression. Adventures and outer space are shown for the sake of entourage, the characters are pale, a good issue has been raised, but it has not been able to really reveal. And already several people told me that they almost fell asleep in the middle of the picture. At Rotten Tomatoes, there is already the usual difference in the ratings of critics (83%) and audience (42%). But if you like the arthouse, then “To the Stars” can come up, despite the budget and shootings, the picture gives the impression of an auteur movie.
I express gratitude to the Rodina Cinema and personally to Milla Timasheva for the invitation.
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