pro_crustes

Watching this film, I kept trying to like it. And it kept slapping me in the face with a rubber fish. Only at the end, when I saw it was made by Gunn, did I realize what I it was I had just seen.

Image Superman channeling "Star-Lord" from Guardians of the Galaxy, and you'll know what to expect. If you liked Guardians, you'll like this. If you didn't (and I didn't), you won't like this. It's really that simple. Gunn's silly, childish, insecure characterization for both protagonists actually almost works in Guardians. But that's because Quill is in way over his head. He's got delusions of grandeur that can never be real. Kent, on the other hand, has no delusions. He's Superman, fergawdsake. Grandeur is his defining quality. Making him an immature brat turns him into an annoying and (owing to his unstoppable power) slightly frightening entity. Unlike Quill, I couldn't have any sympathy for him.

This is kind of a parody or, at best, a pastiche of other, better works. Unfortunately, the moviegoing public seems to be supporting a general trend of heroes evolving from imperfect adults into no-account frat boys (Chris Pine's take on Kirk, for example). Again, if that's your jam, this is your movie. In my case, I sure do miss Christopher Reeve.

Lots of heart and honest treatment of a clever variation on the time-travel story here. The main character gets sent back in time without knowing it happened to him. This makes his interactions with people he meets all the more credible, as he has none of the swagger a Man of the Future tends to display in sf films of this genre.

There are one or two paradoxes allowed into the whole thing, but those go with the territory. The last one, which comes up at the very end, is kind of poetic and will leave you thinking.

Overall, this has tended to be an underrated film in the years since it was made. That's too bad. It's good for anyone teenaged or up, has some clear morality lessons, a good story, and is just plain fun.

Nicely done biopic of a man whose work is beloved by countless fans of science fiction and space exploration. They made a mild mistake of emphasizing how well his work matched the future it predicted. In some cases, the match was close. In others, pretty far off. Writers of science fiction often get measured this way too. In both cases, it's a mistake.

The emotional impact of a work of art is not about its validity as any kind of forecast or prediction. The floating stones of Magritte and the fifth-dimensional "tesseracts" of L'Engle aren't very accurate either. But no one holds that against them, so why do it to Bonestell? His inspirational images are as good as what those two did, and should still be as celebrated.

But here's my bigger criticism: this biopic does celebrate, but it doesn't investigate. Bonestell's personal story is interesting, but the telling here opens questions it doesn't answer. Mostly, it brings up personal relationships that have features unusual enough that you will have obvious questions about them. You will wonder, but you won't find out.

My guess is that this kind of project depends on the willing cooperation of friends of the person who it is about. Understandably, they want to present him in a favorable way. Pursuing anything that conflicts with that risks alienating sources you don't want to lose. Of course, that's just a guess. This is still a good piece of work and the only such material of its kind I know of about Chesley Bonestell.

Towards the end, there is a bit of technical information about how he created some of his paintings that was, I thought, especially interesting. It did answer a few questions I've always had about how he did some of his most precise, almost geometrically exact, renditions of space hardware. That plus his overall life's story made this worth the 90 minutes it consumed.

I saw this for free on Tubi (with a few commercials). See it if you like the work of Chesley Bonestell.