He doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone, he just wants to cause a little mayhem. The goose himself, waddling around and honking at people, perfectly encapsulates the childlike naughtiness that resides in all or most of us.
It’s both incredibly wicked and profoundly sweet. Of course it’s all harmless, “Looney Tunes” stuff, and its disarming “gosh darn you goose!” vibe is part of why people like me attach to it strongly. Your goals are simple, mean-spirited tasks: make the gardener hammer his own thumb, scare a kid into a phone booth, steal the keys to the gate. UNTITLED GOOSE GAME–“Untitled Goose Game,” if you haven’t heard, is a charmingly mean-spirited little adventure where you play a troublesome goose that wanders into a small village and wrecks havoc on everyone. This is just personal preference, though, and a fair case could be made that I’m wrong.
#Tv tropes untitled goose game movie#
“Astra” is a tighter, cleaner movie but its ceiling is lower. It has emotional moments that really punch, and while I knocked it for not thinking of the buggie chase, it also has its fair share of jaw-dropping action spectacle and space photography. “Interstellar” is more flawed, but also more successful. So where does “Ad Astra” land for me? I really like it, but I wanted to love it and thought I was going to for a while there, and I’m really bummed about that. James Gray is no hack, but he made a misstep here. Hacks fall back on these tropes as a shortcut to emotional investment and it rarely works. I don’t know anything about the family life of Kirk Douglas’ character in “Paths of Glory,” and I don’t care. Many of the best movies ever made don’t tell you ANYTHING beyond the bare essentials about their characters. Too many filmmakers assume that adding backstory or some kind of “my dad never loved me” subplot automatically improves a movie, but that’s really not true. As “All The President’s Men” proves, sometimes process is fascinating enough to not need much else.
I think “Astra” would have been better off without the father-son story at all. It’s weird to watch a movie that is so inventive and original fall back on cliches that even a “Fast and Furious” movie would furrow its brow at. Tommy Lee Jones plays Pitt’s father, and I won’t give away what happens there, except to say I didn’t like it, didn’t buy it, and felt nothing as a result of it. Liv Tyler plays the most Liv Tyler-y role in the universe, a crazy unconvincing and tropey frustrated wife who has left for foggy, unspecified reasons. The voice over narration at the end literally made me roll my eyes, and I’m not someone who does that. “Ad Astra” wants to be “Apocalypse Now,” a cold and alienating journey into the dark night of the soul, but towards the end it suddenly decides to be a weepy drama, and that crap just does not play. The problem is, the emotional core of the story isn’t there. They would’ve worked in “Interstellar,” but frankly, “Interstellar” didn’t think of them, and should have. Neither of these sequences would work in “Star Trek” or “Gravity,” they are incredibly specific to “Astra’s” timeline. Ditto for a horrifying SOS response call sequence that baffled, surprised and horrified me. There’s a Moon buggie chase/shootout that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, it’s one of the best action sequences I can remember. It’s like a frontier journey story where the frontier is space. Writer/director James Gray clearly sat down and thought hard about what kind of shenanigans you might get into trying to go from Earth to Neptune in a time when that’s POSSIBLE but difficult. This is an area not as often covered in science fiction cinema, and it produces set pieces no one else has ever even thought of. But my favorite thing about “Ad Astra” is its setting: the somewhat, but not super distant, future. The cinematography looks a LOT like “Interstellar,” perhaps because they hired that movie’s cinematographer. Let’s focus on the positive: Brad Pitt is great he really is underrated and was born for a role like this. For long stretches, it’s a really fascinating (albeit hugely scientifically inaccurate) film, but its conclusion bogs down in bloodless trope, and now I’m struggling to reconnect with the emotions I felt earlier on. There’s an old saying that if you had to choose, you’d rather have a movie start poorly and end well than the other way around, because bad endings are more recent in your mind and cast a pall over what came before. AD ASTRA–“Ad Astra” is a really good movie until it suddenly isn’t.
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