Anger at 37,000 ft.

So, ok yeah, it took less than two weeks back before I got behind again but in my defense Your Honour, I was getting all the last minute stuff ready for my Honeymoon in Japan and something had to give. This does however, afford me the opportunity to write my first post in a plane at the titular 37,000 feet, somewhere over Northern Russia I think and an eleven and a half hour flight (not bad for a cherry-popper, go big or go home right?) has given me the chance to catch a bunch of relatively new movies that in some cases, I missed at the cinema so hats off to Japan Airlines for more than just the very generous leg room.

First off the bat was the relatively meaty Ad Astra, which from the trailers you could easily mistake for an Interstellar clone without all the obligatory Chris Nolan time-related shenanigans. It's a relatively straight forward affair: Brad Pitt is a grizzled veteran astronaut with a wayward astrophysicist father who may or may not be sending deadly pulses of energy from Neptune to Earth and could kill everyone. I mean once you say it like that it sounds patently ridiculous, but actually it's quite serious affair even when a dude gets his face eaten by space baboons. We'll come back to that. It's a nicely paced thriller, narrated in part by Pitt's increasingly agitated psych exams as he comes to terms with his Father's absenteeism neglect, his own urge to not do the same and his frustration at his employers pulling him out of the mission at a pivotal moment. Once you say it like that it sounds patently dull, but the truth lies somewhere in between. There's enough action and suspense here to keep things ticking over, particularly the bit where they honestly do run into some seriously ticked off baboons in a crippled research vessel and they get to chowing down on some of the captain's more prominent facial features. It also leads to the first instance I've ever seen of someone trying to fix a shattered space helmet with lashings of gaffer tape so I'll give the props for that. There are also space pirates who are less piratey than you'd hope for and don't actually come away with any swag in the end so fat lot of use they were in the end. They didn't  even have parrots. 

Tommy Lee Jones pops up as Pitt's Lazurus-like Dad, previously thought to be dead, now actually potentially alive and suffering from space madness. The ending isn't completely unpredictable but it's decent; the whole movie isn't perhaps as engaging as it could be, but at the start of 12 hours in the air, couldn't knock it. It did leave me hankering for something a bit less serious, though.

I missed Ready or Not at the cinema, after seeing the trailers and thinking it looked like a fairly fun sort of comedy horror; can't say I was disappointed because that's exactly what it is. It's not necessary laugh out loud funny; just as well really given that apparently it was pretty quiet on the plane and more or less everyone was either asleep or similarly plugged into headphones so a series of booming guffaws may not have been terribly well received. I'm fairly convinced this might be the first movie to adapt a non-video/board game, so it's no surprise the plot is pretty simple: effectively hide and seek with added murder and possible sprinklings of Satan. Samara Weaving makes for a good heroine and it's refreshing to see her neither a fawning damsel in distress nor go directly from zero to ultimate gun toting badass at the drop of a hat. There is a bit of a twist towards the end and the true finale is fairly glorious, but I won't spoil that for you obviously. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the gratuitous interface of a slew of ballistics, sharp objects, blunt objects and freshly brewed pots of tea with the softer parts of various peoples anatomies.

So that's hours 0 to about 4 of the flight out. At this point I think we were served a very palatable chicken curry for dinner and makes for a convenient break. Join us in part two for at least one decent Superhero movie, an absolute horror show I should have/did see coming and some ropey effects spoiling an otherwise half-decent film.