According to Deadline, Ad Astra director James Gray is putting together a truly unfair cast for his next film, with Robert De Niro, Oscar Isaac, Anne Hathaway, and Donald Sutherland joining the previously announced Cate Blanchett in Armageddon Time. Despite that title and the fact that Gray’s last movie was about a car chase on the moon, Armageddon Time isn’t about a ragtag group of dudes trying to blow up an asteroid before it hits the Earth—in fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. Deadline says it’s a period drama based on Gray’s “childhood memories,” telling a coming-of-age story about “friendship and loyalty against the backdrop of an America poised to elect Ronald Reagan as president.”
The Deadline story has some interesting details on what Gray wants to say with this movie and how it’s going to “political and historic” while also filled with “love and warmth.” It’s worth reading if you’re interested in either him or this project, but it’s all kind of swallowed up by one particular detail: The story of Gray’s childhood involves him being pulled out of public school and taken to a private school in New York that was also attended by one Donald Trump—whose father, a noted real estate tycoon who seems to have once been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally, was on the board of trustees. Gray’s story is about haves and have-nots and “how we are separated along the lines of class and ethnicity,” so it seems likely that the Trump family will play some kind of role in his story. Deadline doesn’t mention who those aforementioned famous people will play, but Donald Sutherland does unfortunately bear some resemblance to Fred Trump (who is basically just the bad guy from The Hunger Games with different facial hair anyway).
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Armageddon Time isn’t about a ragtag group of dudes trying to blow up an asteroid before it hits the Earth—in fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. Deadline says it’s a period drama based on Gray’s “childhood memories,” telling a coming-of-age story about “friendship and loyalty against the backdrop of an America poised to elect Ronald Reagan as president.”Ronald Reagan? The actor?
Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?
That’s heavy, man.
I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady!
He was actually married to Nancy by that point, although that could be deliberate on the part of the writers.
I just watched “Back to the Future” for the first time in years. There was a lot of funny dialogue I didn’t remember from watching it other times. For example, when Marty tells ‘50s Doc that Ronald Reagan will be president in 1985, the sarcastic, disbelieving reaction is “Who’s Vice President? Jerry Lewis?” I heard about Reagan being a president before ever finding out he’d been an actor. It must have been weird to see him become president after knowing him as an actor first. I love the way “Back to the Future” cleverly pointed out how absurd this turn of events must have seemed to people who grew up with Reagan in movies.
It seemed crazy until those wacky Republicans elected an addled, racist, sexist reality show host who wants to bang his own daughter. What a country!
Can’t wait for the reboot set in current times- “Donald Trump, the racist, sexist dipshit real estate developer?” “Oh, he’s still those things.”
didn’t they say that Trump inspired Biff in Part 2?
Watching that film was actually the first time I heard of Reagan.
Why wasn’t Fred Trump more famous? The reason I ask is that I imagine it would’ve been harder for Donald to pass himself off as a business genius instead of an idiot wasting his dad’s money.
Less of a shameless self-promoter. Donald loves putting his name on things, even if he has basically nothing to do with them.
He got a guest staring role in last year’s Watchmen show!
I am so here for this. Gray can be magnificent in the right circumstances and financing (Lost City of Z is amazing), or when just doing his own thing (The Yards is a particular underrated venture). Bobby D needs good source material and direction to achieve his old lofty heights. Issac is the new Pacino. Less focus on Fred Drumpf and more focus on the stories in between the lines.
Just yesterday I tried watching The Great and it occurred to me that one of the things that annoyed me was shared by Lost City of Z: the attempt to graft anachronistic politics onto the protagonist under the assumption that’s the only way an audience will care about them. The Great at least has some silly humor to it, but not enough to get me to watch another episode. Lost City of Z was just a long slog, however well made. I thought We Own the Night and The Immigrant were better though.
Cant speak on The Great. To be fair, I though Ad Astra was a long slog- but sir, Lost City of Z is anything but.
Having only watched Ad Astra and Lost City of Z, I’m interested in seeing how Gray handles a more intimate, smaller scale drama. The other two movies seemed to me to be trying for character studies within epic scales in plot, time spans, setting, etc., and in both, I felt like the characters often got lost in their outsized worlds and stories.
I’m going to give Lost City of Z a go then. Just to clarify, it’s about a lost city entirely inhabited by this guy?
Accurate.
I just watch Ad Astra. It’s the current Avatar, just cribbing The Black Hole and Interstellar instead.
The script feels like someone polled the room for ideas and then used everything.
“Car chase!” “Pirates on the moon!” “Face-eating monkeys!” “FACE-EATING MONKEYS IN ZERO-G!”
And then someone was like “yeah but what about a plot? How do any of those things go together?” And then that person was ridiculed out of the room.
I thought it was like Apocalypse Now with a bit of Oedipus. I’ve never seen Avatar, but I was under the impression it’s like Dances With Wolves/The Last Samurai.
Ah yes, I meant Apocalypse Now, not Interstellar. It had the same visual feel as Interstellar, but the story was definitely Heart of Darkness. Except they managed to stretch about 15 minutes worth of plot into 2 hours. “I violated orders and killed a bunch of people, just like my dad! Now I get to bang Arwen again!”
I love Ad Astra, one of the best films of 2019. It’s a character study and a mood piece, so looking for a conventional “plot” is kind of misguided.
I agree, but I think the movie works much better as a mood piece than as a character study, given that they don’t do anything particularly surprising or new beyond pretty conventional “daddy issues” and “learning to be a responsible man” character arcs. As a kind of moody road trip movie, I found it pretty engaging, but it didn’t do much for me beyond that.
I came out of Ad Astra thinking exactly the same thing I thought coming out of 1997’s Contact: all that effort, all those deaths, just to resolve some daddy issues? Except that Contact had better science.
This is a really weird assessment of a movie which most detractors say “nothing happens.” This movie has (and needs) about as much plot as Apocalypse Now; it’s about the ding-dang journey into the darknesss.
Ehhh… it’s not too late to turn it into an asteroid movie.
Why’d they spell it wrong?
Armageddon Time, come on grab your armies, we’ll go to very hellish lands, with Oscar the Beast and Anne the Horseman, the world is gonna end, it’s Armageddon Time!
Mini-”The Intern” reunion!
James Gray movies are slow and boring. They masquerade as meditative but actually they’re pretty dopey. Lost City of Z got away with it because the setting encourages long slow takes to listen to the natural sounds, but the rest of his stuff is just portentous and underwritten. I’ll say it: The Immigrant sucks.