4K Review: Do ‘Ad Astra’ And ‘Rambo 5’ Deserve A Second Chance?
4K Review: Do ‘Ad Astra’ And ‘Rambo 5’ Deserve A Second Chance?
Ad Astra and Rambo: Last Blood opened opposite each other back in September, and now out on 4K and Blu-ray, they’re doing it again. The last time around, they both got squashed by Downton Abbey, of all movies, but now they have a chance at redemption. If you skipped them both at the time, as I did, you may wonder if in fact they deserve it. The Brad Pitt sci-fi drama made $130 million worldwide, on a budget estimated at anywhere between $80-100 million. Rambo made $91 million worldwide on a $50 million budget, which is better, but not even making back the budget in domestic grosses ($44.8 million) ain’t great. It’s a moribund franchise that producers keep hoping to revive, but the fact is Rambo hasn’t meant big money since the ‘80s. Unlike Sylvester Stallone’s other signature character Rocky, who’s a lovable underdog made good, Rambo is a psychotic ubermensch, which is harder to relate to.
Both 4K discs come bearing extras that make clear all involved put a great deal of thought into their movies. It’s arguable that one of them overthought, and the other underthought, and you can probably guess which is which. But once you watch the Rambo production diary, or listen to James Gray’s Ad Astra commentary, you might wonder if people missed something, and underrated these movies the first time around.
I’m going to argue that Rambo got a bad rap, as it is probably the second-best film in an admittedly wildly erratic franchise. It is basically Rambo does Taken, but unlike that Liam Neeson actioner and its sequels, it’s neither shy about an R rating nor edited completely incoherently. Many reviews at the time noted that having right-wing icon John Rambo killing Mexicans was some sort of Trumpian fever fantasy, but that feels like overstating it, and honestly, this may be where Sylvester Stallone and director Adrian Grunberg (hired mainly for his second-unit work on Narcos) underthought things. They wanted to do a movie that dealt with sex-trafficking, and something that would be personal to Rambo (his daughter figure being kidnapped and abused). Based on the behind-the-scenes extras, in which they’re quite candid, I don’t think they calculated the optics in terms of politics.
Besides, this is a movie that’s not exactly realistic, despite what anyone involved may say. Rambo at one point reaches into a man’s shoulder and physically breaks off a piece of his rib, later, he tears out a beating heart, Mortal Kombat style. The first half of the movie is all slow build, the second is Stallone going full Jason Voorhees, albeit with guns, death traps, and bombs. Every Rambo movie is about pushing a trained killing machine too far, and everyone regretting it, this is no different. The title Last Blood has a double meaning, these might be his last kills, but it’s also about the final members of his family (”blood”) left alive.
I now own all the Rambo movies in 4K, and this one, unsurprisingly, looks by far the best, having clearly been adapted promptly. Just like in the similarly cartel-themed Sicario: Day of the Soldado, much of the one-man warfare down in Mexico takes place at night. and a beautifully lit, sharp-focus night it is. Besides the production diaries, which consistently overestimate the number of Rambo fans out there, an extensive featurette with Tyler Bates analyzes the score more deeply than I’ve seen any bonus feature do in a long time. And to be fair, the score is killer. It has also been a while since I’ve been okay letting a Blu-ray menu stay onscreen so long because the music snippet is just that good. Nice job recreating Arizona in Bulgaria, too.
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Complaints that an action movie is right-wing don’t go very far with me, because inherently, the entire genre is right-wing. You’re talking about movies whose entire premise is usually that bureaucracy protects evil people, and only a hero with their own weapons can truly challenge the bad person and kill them in order to save the world/city/homestead. As much as Stallone may reference ‘70s movies, the violence in Rambo: Last Blood gets so cartoonish — we’re talking Itchy and Scratchy — that it’s impossible to take as any kind of comment on reality. Yes, dumb people will, but we can’t control what morons do.
James Gray also references ‘70s movies, among other things, when it comes to his Ad Astra. Like so many filmmakers inspired by Stanley Kubrik, he wants to make his version of 2001, but that’s not enough. He also wants it to be his Solaris, his Apocalypse Now, and his Moby Dick. It’s hard to imagine a film that could possibly live up to those expectations, and Ad Astra does not. It is, essentially, “I journeyed to the far end of space just to resolve my daddy issues and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
Like First Man, which hit 4K at the beginning of the year, Ad Astra looks and sounds amazing. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and composer Max Richter combine to create an audio-visual environment which truly conveys the astonishing abyss of the infinite. You could lose yourself in this representation of outer space. except that Gray won’t let you. Like that first cut of Blade Runner, he just can’t quit it with voice over narration, as Brad Pitt does not shut up on the topic of what he thinks and how he feels. Gray indicates on the commentary that we are supposed to notice the contrast between what his face says and what his words say, or the difference in what he’ll tell a computer and what he’ll tell humans. This would be easier if he’d be quieter.
Gray goes into so much detail on his literary references, divergences from real science, and moments of inspiration (learning that the tests of the original atomic bomb were considered to have a 1% chance of destroying all matter set him in motion) that I feel bad his final film doesn’t quite convey all of this. He wanted to make a movie about the psychology of knowing we’re alone in the universe, and infinitely small, and what that does — his solution is that it makes us hug our family closer. Duh. I wish I got that sense of madness from the movie. The space pirates and baboons feel random rather than thematic, and the 2001 references, frankly, can’t compete with 2001. With that said, it looks and sounds amazing enough to show off your system, if that’s a thing you seek.
