The Astronaut: Terrible At Everything It Tried

The Astronaut Fittingly Falls Apart As It Continues

The Astronaut tricks you into thinking it’s a good movie. It’s not. God, is it not. I haven’t had a movie disappoint me so deep into its runtime in forever. The opening scenes hook you in with a cool mystery and then plays with expectations in a way that suggests solid writing is yet to come…and then it all goes speeding downhill.

I swear The Astronaut cut out scenes or altered the script sometime in its production from the original plan, because the number of basically dropped story concepts is staggering. I paid attention—I heard every line of dialogue clearly. No movie with this many good actors and cool sets should have this shoddy of writing, but I’m left with no other conclusion. Let me take you through the premise a bit, and you’ll see what I mean.

There Could Have Been A Pretty Great Movie Here

We start with an astronaut who, sometime during her flight, has something go very wrong. Her spaceship is covered in weird red marking (which may just be the burn of entry) and her helmet is cracked open. But she’s not dead. She can’t recall what shattered her mask, but otherwise is in stable condition. I was worried I’d be watching a beat-for-beat cousin of Ash (which I reviewed last week) for a moment and I’d be going through another amnesia plot—but no, she’s aware, responsive, and even openly tells the doctor’s that she sees a pen floating (which they immediately say is a normal thing to happen to people back from space—whether or not that’s true in real life, I don’t know). The inciting incident of The Astronaut is that they need to keep an eye on her and keep her somewhat isolated so they can see if anything changes, but she never seems imprisoned or anything. The horror comes from the uncertainty if she’s just experiencing symptoms of space flight or if something alien is actually going on. And, like I said, it does work for a bit. The Astronaut consistently takes pains (at first) to present things as logical, explainable, and done for specific reasons that most of the characters are okay with, so it really does remain a mystery for a bit what’s happening. Even when we see another thing levitate (an egg this time) it’s still possible that she just dropped it and it cracked during another hallucination.

The Astronaut Subverts Expectations A Few Times

So, sounds cool, right? A space-themed twist on a thriller concept. They even bake in the explanation that, because she wants to go to space again soon, she’s withholding information from the doctors about the severity of her symptoms—which again, I don’t know if it’s realistic to astronauts, but it does feel generally realistic to people with very physical jobs. It works as a character moment and plot point until—very quickly—credulity stretches too thin. I don’t care how dedicated someone is; this is not how this established personality would react to this scenario. Thus, the narrative switches tactics and screeches its wheels as it does so. A lot of thrillers rely on having a female character unable to trust her senses and have everyone around her not believe her. And though The Astronaut does noticeably try to dial back on that problematic genre tendency, it’s not doing so effectively. It becomes that kind of story, regardless.

Now that’s annoying all on its own, especially for a mystery tale. But what if I told you, what if I told you, by the end of the movie, that we never find out for sure what happened in the spaceship? We never get confirmation of anything regarding the levitation. And we spend most of the movie going over and over again the same damn scare setup until it becomes almost laughable.

The Astronaut Falls Into A Really Annoying Pattern

This is what I mean by stretched credulity. The Astronaut is, by volume, our main character investigating (by herself, in the dark, miles from any other people) weird animalistic noises and then getting scared, and then—usually—passing out and waking up in her bed. There are some semi-decent body horror shots involving a weird rash getting worse, but I was left constantly questioning why this scenario was continuing as it is. I won’t spoil the twist, but The Astronaut has a “big” twist, and I actually think the film makes less sense knowing what it is. It certainly makes the scenes about motherhood and infertility feel problematic or possibly offensive to actual parents.

Basically, the movie falls apart by the end. It collapses to dust by the end. The plotlines it wants to converge kind of converge, and we get ending scenes that tonally belong in a different movie. The Astronaut likely started with good ideas, but the writing, the pacing, the CGI, the structure, all fail, and you end up with a movie that somehow feels like a generic thriller, an undercooked sci-fi, and a weak horror story, all in less than two hours.

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