Ad Astra is a popular Latin phrase meaning “through hardships to the stars”.

The new movie starring Brad Pitt, “Ad Astra” is mostly about one thing. What would happen to any human being if he or she were traveling in space for a very long period of time, with no hope of ever returning home again?

What the world knows right now is traveling to Mars or further is going to take a huge amount of new technology, and trillions of dollars. Phase one of this new technology will have to address the huge problem of keeping any human being from going insane over months and years of traveling through the nothingness of space. Environment simulators, deep sleep and so many other technologies would be necessary for such a huge undertaking of long term space travel. The realization that the longer you travel away from the earth, would mean that much time again, to ever return home. Long periods of time being confined to small spaces with many hours of little or nothing to do is another problem. Like any person in prison knows, “while you’re in here, there is no place to go”.

As for the film Ad Astra, the story is about an astronaut Roy McBride, played by Brad Pitt trying to rescue his father, Clifford McBride, played by Tommy Lee Jones who is deep in space near Saturn and may have gone insane, along with all in his party – that left earth some 12 years earlier.

I thought this movie was either slow or boring in too many places, because the story is mostly about several mishaps in space as Roy tries to save his father and also prevent power surges that are being emitted from his father’s space ship. I thought the technology behind the power surges did not make much sense, considering the 2.5 billion mile distance from the edge of Saturn to planet Earth. The special effects of this film will remind everyone of “Gravity” from 2013, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. I thought Gravity was a far better movie, that had excellent space special effects along with a better story. Ad Astra tries to make up for a mostly weak story with great special effects and it fails in some areas and succeeds in others.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Ad Astra is a solid 82%, but because of the slow moving parts of some of this story, I give this movie only a 75% rating, with a mild recommendation.

“Rambo Last Blood” has one of the most infuriating scenes I have ever seen in an action movie. Rambo is completely surrounded by about 100 heavily armed members of a drug and sex trafficking cartel headed by two ruthless brothers. Just when they were about to kill Rambo one of the brothers says, “let him go”. In my opinion, this one scene alone is responsible for the 30% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. If there is any one cause that will ruin any screenplay, its the lack of believability. There is no way in one million years, that a violent cartel of 100 armed men would have let John Rambo go within this situation. The scenes leading up to this point also make no sense, as Rambo just walks into a series of buildings where many armed men are standing around. So many movies have done something like this in the past, including too many James Bond movies, and every episode of the 1960’s Batman TV series. The Villain can easily kill the hero by shooting them, but instead, the hero is let go either because of some elaborate and very often ridiculous method of killing them or they escape in some other way only because they are not immediately killed with a gun. In the case of this last Rambo movie, perhaps having Rambo escape by jumping off the building he was captured on would have saved this story, but instead, inexplicably, they just let him go.

Rambo Last Blood is different than all the other Rambo’s in that is not about any war. Its about Rambo saving his niece who has been sold into sex slavery in Mexico. Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, who now at age 73 has made 6 Rocky Movies, 5 Rambo movies and 2 Creed movies – the spin off of the 6 Rocky movies. In the history of cinema there has probably never been a longer running and more lucrative series involving 2 characters created by one actor and screenwriter. This new and most likely last Rambo plays more like the movie “Taken” without anywhere near the same level of satisfying ending. As a matter of fact, I did not like the direction this movie takes, especially the ending, which like the last Rambo in 2008, was far too unnecessarily violent. This last Rambo was made for the embedded box office due to name recognition, and not for quality like the last Rocky movie released in 2006, which was a very good film. All of this is very unfortunate, especially because most of this could have been fixed with about another few weeks of rewrites of the screenplay.

Overall, I agree with the low rating of 30% on Rotten Tomatoes and do not recommend Rambo Last Blood.

Some of the best movies ever released, are those that are true stories that fill in the gaps in world history. The new movie “Official Secrets” is about what happened in early 2003, when the United States and England were collaborating to fabricate reasons to invade Iraq, that the world now realizes was an “illegal war”.

The reasons for invading Iraq in March 2003 were many, but the most prevalent was revenge for the 2001 Terrorist attacks that caused the worst civilian casualties on American soil in this history of the United States. However revenge for mass murder on American soil is not an valid and legal reason to invade another country. A massive and collaborative effort began with England and the United States to convince the UN security council that Iraq had to be invaded and Saddaam Hussein removed from power before he could use his destructive weapons.

The final solution to finding an excuse to invade Iraq, repeated many hundreds of times, was that “Iraq had weapons of mass destruction”. During a speech in front of the UN security Council Secretary of State Colin Powell, pleaded with the UN to allow the United States and England to invade Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell now considers this one moment, the worst in his entire career, because Iraq never had any of the weapons Powell was talking about.

The story of Official Secrets starts with a government agent in England, Katharine Gun, played by Keira Knightley whose job was to scan emails and translate messages, looking for possible information that could be used by the spy agencies of England. A single email was scanned one day, that suggested that a reason to invade Iraq was being fabricated by both England and the United States. Rather than ignoring this message, Katherine, realizing that she could possibly stop an illegal war and prevent the deaths of thousands of people, decided to send this email message to the press. The story that followed was all about politics, and the difference between doing the right thing no matter what the cost, or just doing your job.

This movie does an excellent job of showing this low point in the history of both the United States and England, like no other movie I have seen about this embarrassing incident from the year 2003. The legal ramifications and politics involved were also very well portrayed and fascinating throughout the two hours.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Official Secrets is a very solid 80% and I agree with this rating and recommend this film.