What Ad Astra Gets Wrong

On Gizmodo, astrophysicist and film critic, Andy Howell, rips into  Ad Astra, the new big budget space epic starring Brad Pitt.  (Lots of spoilers so don't read it if that bothers you.)

As an astrophysicist and a film critic, I’ve been waiting my whole life for a big-budget adventure film that spans the whole solar system. There are some stunning sequences in Ad Astra, and many of the details about astronaut life and space travel are spot-on. But some of the themes and ideas that drive the plot are based on astronomical misconceptions.

Ad Astra touts itself as having help from NASA, so presumably someone somewhere gave them some advice. Still, there are plenty of ways science advising can go wrong— miscommunication, script conflicts, misconceptions, and outright mistakes. In Ad Astra, those mistakes range from wrong ideas about space travel to inaccuracies about basic astronomy.

What bothers me more is the disregard for real science and physics. I will go to see the movie anyway, but I hate having to turn off the intellectual part of my mind when I sit down in the theatre. Why has it been 50 years and nobody has beaten 2001 at getting it right?