Astro is a 2018 sci-fi thriller about a billionaire’s private space exploration program that returns to Earth with an abducted extraterrestrial from a newly discovered alien planet.
I’m old enough to remember when drive-in movies were still kind of a thing, when you’d go to see a big studio picture only after you sat through a bit of wobbly schlock. This double-feature movie experience was a load of fun because you got the chance to see low budget Z-grade flicks you’d never have given a chance otherwise. Some of the best (worst) were the science fiction movies featuring cheap special effects, laughable dialogue and silly aliens. They were shot bad, acted worse, and served only to make the marque title look better. Most were great fun.
Sitting through Asif Akbar‘s newest film Astro, I felt a little transported, and a lot nostalgic for those old nights in the station wagon, feeling as if I were in the back seat looking under the rear view mirror at the action on screen. Astro is everything those old movie were, dreadfully cheesy, convoluted, melodramatic, and hard to follow, mostly because you don’t really try all that hard to stay tuned. It follows a former military man named Jack Adams (Gary Daniels), who is on his own raising his now 19-year-old daughter Laura (Courtney Akbar), who gets a call from old buddy Alexander Biggs (Marshal Hilton), a man of great wealth who is working on a space exploration program. Seems Alex has gained huge advances in technology thanks to a bit of alien help and currently has him an elvish looking creature from space who is somehow DNA-connected with Jack. How? Well, Biggs wants to work that out, and in doing so, a whole host of nefarious agent types get involved and things get messy.
It’s a huge plot, one purposefully dense as Akbar and co-writer Bernard Selling are busy working on a book series as well, hoping to make this into a franchise. However, this seems to overextend what the filmmakers can do as Astro is often simply impossible to follow, with flashbacks within flashbacks, some confusing editing, and a few different species of aliens that aren’t quite clearly understood, not to mention time spent with characters and scenes that have very little to do with the story, or at least press it forward with any momentum. Perhaps if this had been developed as a television series rather than a film it might have made more sense.
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I’ve never been one to blame a director for ambition. A lot of critics of low-budget independent films tend to throw that word around as an excuse for why a film might not hold up, saying that a filmmaker is too ambitious for the project. I applaud directors who do what they can to tell their stories, even as many can’t get on screen something all that believable. I’ve always (mostly) been able to get past poor visuals in service to a good story. That said, Akbar clearly had almost nothing in his budget for effects, with space ships and other CGI visuals truly low grade, which ultimately, with a story that is as hard to keep up with as this and one that takes itself far too seriously, weakens a lot of the experience.
There is a market for ultra low budgets films, and with a cast including B-movie favorites Daniels, Hilton, and Michael Paré, some will surely get a kick out of the throwback feel. As the first title in a double feature, watching from the back seat of the ol’ wagon, maybe it could be better appreciated.
Astro premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and releases on VOD June 5 via Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.