The simple logline for “Downton Abbey” is: “A huge Hotel/Mansion in the 1930’s is surprised when the King and Queen of England decide to stay there for a few days”. How an idea this trivial has been made into a 2 hour movie is a mystery to me. There are a few side stories along the way to the coma this film creates and they are all equally boring. Downton Abbey was a TV show that ran from 2011-2016 – a show that I never watched and considering how bad this movie was, I never will. I am at a loss to figure out why this movie has such high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. My only theory is – people are very curious about the lives of Royalty and the extremely wealthy, so it doesn’t matter if there is not much of a story or no story at all.
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This movie was a nightmare to sit through that involved constantly checking my watch and even taking the risk of turning on my cell phone. This movie is so boring, with so little story that its almost impossible to even review. In summary, run from this trivial and boring waste of 2 hours.
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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.