Directed by James Gray, AD ASTRA (2019) is a visually interesting film aspiring to far more pathos than it earns. I liked it, though its blatant allusions to APOCALYPSE NOW and the discordance between the space journey and the simple message made it feel a little empty.

In the latest Twenty-first Century, the solar system is colonized up to Mars. Human installations are beginning to be struck by mysterious power surges that ultimately threaten civilization and possibly all human life. Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt being Brad Pitt and as usual great to look at), son of astronaut H. Clifford McBride (the great Tommy Lee Jones), who is believed dead, is called into a meeting with space brass. They tell Roy that his father is alive and that his Lima Project–exploration past Neptune to search for extraterrestrial life–is the source of the power surges. His mission is to travel to Mars and try to reach his father, though he finds himself going much farther.

Similarly to APOCALYPSE NOW, the film appears based on Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS, though it bears far more similarities with the movie than the novel. If you know that classic war film, you’ll recognize many of its elements in AD ASTRA. The plot rolls out in a similarly episodic fashion, with Roy surviving violent encounters on the Moon, on the way to Mars, and on Mars itself. Along the way, he narrates an internal monologue about his relationship with his father and that he’s afraid of what he’ll find. His father is set up as a larger than life figure whose singled-minded pursuit of fulfilling his mission turned him utterly ruthless and possibly mad.

AD ASTRA has a nice literary feel to it, a simple message that there is much to discover among humanity right here at home, visually stunning landscapes, some terrific action sequences, and great casting. Overall, it has a really cool feel to it, a moody atmosphere. The problem is it simply doesn’t tie together and the parts don’t sum up to earn the gravitas claimed for the whole. Nothing about the violent episodes Roy survives changes or prepares him for finding his father. They serve no thematic purpose, no purpose at all, in fact, other than to produce action scenes and eat up runtime. The descent into the “heart of darkness” is supposed to be about gradually stripping away moral convention to discover the violent human animal, but this isn’t that story. Otherwise, the characters are mostly coldly detached, which creates an emotional distance with the viewer; that serves the theme, but without the plot and theme jiving, it only bogs the story down.

Overall? I liked AD ASTRA a lot. Good, though it could have been fantastic, an instant sci-fi classic, if it had the right story to justify its pretensions. Overall, AD ASTRA certainly reached for the stars. Though it failed in that for me, it settled for the moon.

Based on the novel by James McBride, THE GOOD LORD BIRD is a miniseries that tells the story of a young slave who is swept up with John Brown toward the Abolitionist’s violent fate at Harper’s Ferry, where he hoped to end slavery with an armed insurrection. I found the show uneven and at times tonally confusing, though it builds up to a very powerful finish.

First, let’s look at the historical John Brown. He became a national figure during the Bleeding Kansas period of violence in the territory over whether it would enter the Union as a free or slave state. While most abolitionists also believed in pacifism, Brown saw the slaveholder as morally sick and tied to an economic system that could only be reformed by destroying it. As a chosen instrument of God, he believed he would be the destroyer. After fighting in several pitched battles in this state-level civil war, he came up with a plan to capture the Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry and arm slaves to fight for their freedom. While this plan failed bloodily, with Robert E. Lee snuffing out the rebellion, it became a major catalyst for the Civil War that finally ended this horrific system.

So who was John Brown? A man who understood slavery as so utterly corrupting it could only be solved with bloodshed? A rabid religious fanatic hell bent on violence? A fool? THE GOOD LORD BIRD starts off with these questions in a story largely told through the eyes of Henry, a slave boy. After a fight with pro-slavery men, he is taken along by Brown to join his little army. As Henry is young, Brown mistakenly believes he’s a girl (and his good luck charm), and Henry plays along with it in the belief it’s keeping him alive.

I said the show was tonally confusing for me, and I’ll explain that. The first few episodes at times comes across as farce, comedy, and serious drama. I’m all for a good farce–I loved George MacDonald Fraser’s richly historically detailed FLASHMAN AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD, which portrays Brown as being a morally upright and violent lunatic–but while Brown is fair game for a comic take, slavery isn’t for me.

I haven’t read the book, but watching the show, I wondered why the story had to be told from Henry’s point of view at all, as the character adds very little to the story aside from observing. Though Henry was a slave, he’s very young, and he considered his job–helping his father around a barber shop–as being easier than the life of a guerilla. On the slave side, the better mouthpieces are Frederick Douglas, who believes slavery could be solved without violence, and Harriett Tubman, who believes it could be solved with it. After watching extremely powerful stories like UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, I think Henry could have been brought much more to the story with a different background and taken a much stronger role in the conflict and theme. And while the show isn’t supposed to be a direct history lesson, it easily could have accommodated more of the background and events of Bleeding Kansas, a fascinating historical moment in the USA.

As the show proceeds, the comedy aspects fade away to the violent conclusion, which all plays out in a very satisfying way. The final scenes with Brown are stirring and powerful.

The acting is very good in this. Joshua Caleb Johnson brings a lot to the role of Henry, but Ethan Hawke’s John Brown steals the show, chewing every scene he’s in. It was clearly the role of a lifetime for him, and his acting goes a long way to make Brown not only come alive but appear larger than life.

So overall, I found THE GOOD LORD BIRD uneven but quite satisfying, particularly in how it wrapped up. Not highly recommended, but I’d recommend it just the same.

So I’m going on a tear at Disney+ so I can drop it, and I discovered DEADPOOL 2 popping up. I had a lot of fun with the first one, so I jumped right on it. As a sequel, it’s just as fun if not more so than the original.

In the sequel, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds being Ryan Reynolds and having fun every minute of it) loses everything he loves, and finds to earn peace he must do something good and unselfish. Along comes Russell, an angry teen mutant tortured at a research center who wants revenge and is the target of Cable (Josh Brolin being an awesome straight man to Reynolds’ shtick), a soldier from the future who wants to kill Russell because the kid is going to become a monster. It’s on Deadpool to do the right thing and get the kid on the right path.

I’m not a huge fan of the Marvel formula of a protagonist who constantly wisecracks his way through everything and otherwise offers a wish fulfillment fantasy. It’s entertaining, but if I knew these guys in real life, I’d probably find them exhausting. Despite being a little grating at times, Reynolds pulls it off, though, irreverent and self aware and keeping it light and fun for the most part. There are four elements in DEADPOOL 2 I found a fantastic addition: Deadpool assembling his own superhero team, who meet a hysterical fate; Zazie Beetz’s Domino, a hero whose superpower is being lucky; Brolin’s Cable, an unstoppable Terminator figure on a noble mission of murder and revenge; and Russell’s teamup with Juggernaut (voiced by Reynolds).

And that’s it, that’s the review. DEADPOOL 2 ain’t deep, it’s just good fun, and this sequel brings in plenty of terrific new elements to keep the party going.

Based on the beloved high fantasy series by Robert Jordan, Amazon Prime’s THE WHEEL OF TIME is about a cyclical battle with evil that occurs every three thousand years in a fantasy world. I grew very curious about it when a reviewer called it superior to GAME OF THRONES, though I ended up finding such comparisons best left alone. The same with LORD OF THE RINGS, with which THE WHEEL OF TIME shares a lot in common. Overall, THE WHEEL OF TIME is engaging and fun, but its odd combination of heavy melodrama and perfunctory storytelling kept it from becoming a favorite, making me wish I’d read the books first.

In this story, Moiraine, a sorceress, is searching for the Dragon, a reincarnated hero who appears every three thousand years to fight the Dark One. What’s interesting about the prophecy is the Dragon could be any gender or even number of people, and the Dragon will either save the world or break it. Moiraine travels to a remote village with a proud history, where she meets five locals, one of whom she believes is the Dragon. Hunted by Trollocs, who are basically the Orcs of this world, they must travel to the White Tower and from there to the Dark One’s lair.

The world building is interesting. The Dark One has made it so any man who uses magic goes mad, basically making women the more powerful sex. Oddly, there is little tension resulting from this; the men just go along with women calling the shots enthusiastically. The sorceresses are pretty cool, with interesting powers, and when they use them in battle, it’s pretty awesome to watch them rain wrath and destruction on their enemies. Sets such as the haunted ruins of a city, the White Tower, the Dark One’s lair, and so on are great to look at. What’s missing, though, is an element tying them together. One could argue GAME OF THRONES is overly dense in the beginning with history and characters and family relationships, but wow, does its world ever looked lived in and feel real.

The characters are interesting enough, though there is a lot of contrived conflict, and it’s a relief to see some of them finally have a rational conversation and solve their problems. The central conflict, meanwhile, remains fairly perfunctory and kind of uninteresting throughout. There’s plenty of romance, though it rarely feels organic with far more telling than showing. Overall, there wasn’t a single character I could really get invested in. Repeatedly, I kept wondering if I would have enjoyed the show more if I’d read the books first, if for nothing else to fill in all the background stuff and get in the characters’ heads more.

So while THE WHEEL OF TIME never reached a favorite status for me the way GAME OF THRONES did (well, up to the fifth season, anyway, when GoT started to jump the shark and screw the pooch), I kept finding myself drawn back to it. It turned into a chicken soup kind of show for me, good but not great, and very comfortable to watch. So overall, I liked it, and I’ll watch a second season, but I’ll go on hoping that somebody, someday, will recreate the magic of GAME OF THRONES.