reminded me of The Passengers......

I liked Passengers much better. It had flaws too, but at least it had a good story.

Except Passengers made sense.

Passengers wasn't that great for me because it was just a mediocre drama in space, not really a sci-fi film. BUT THEN, it really wasn't trying to be a sci-fi film. That they were in space on a colonization mission was just an situation for the drama / romance. It was okay for a single viewing, but not really a failure.

Ad Astra was clearly trying to be a sci-fi film (even if Hollywood is now scared of using the sci-fi genre tag in marketing), but failed on SO MANY points. There are so many little scenes where they did a good in respect to the sci-fi (put a lot of effort into and it works well), but it's all glued together with these sad, eye-rolling sci-failure connecting points.

There's nothing wrong with drama in sci-fi films. In fact, it still needs to be a good film story wise (with drama, humor, action, or whatever other kinds of human story-telling elements are making the story). The story-spine about Roy and his dad were really just fine.

Too bad about the really poor sci-fi parts though. It just removes this from the list of films to remember.

-- space monkeys
-- why the monkey ship had to be that far out for the kind of research it was doing
-- I saw no evidence of any crew members on that ship (no body parts or anything -- did I miss it?)
-- I didn't mind the lunar pirates so much
-- They allowed a gun on a ship? What the hell gas was in that tank that was hit that killed everyone?
-- Forget about the Neptune asteroids: how did Roy calculate his trajectory by launching off of that spinning antenna?
-- Use the nuclear explosion as propulsion? Did it just happen to be pointing EXACTLY towards earth?
-- Was there no fuel left for a return trip? Was the computer fried by a surge? That part just wasn't covered well, why Roy thought he needed to ride a nuclear blast home (I was okay with the blast needing to be nuclear, because of the anti-matter thing).
-- They HAD to stop by Mars on the way out, but he went straight back to Earth?