And nobody has ever wanted to go there more than Walt — not Brad Pitt in “Ad Astra,” not Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Total Recall,” not even Grimes in… the life of Grimes.
So many recent space movies — Arrival (2016), Interstellar (2014), First Man (2018), Ad Astra (2019) — have used the template as a means of exploring grief, unresolved trauma and loss, converting the act of leaving Earth into a metaphor for outrunning one’s own internal churn, that it’s refreshing to find a film that reduces the grandiose nature of interstellar travel to a backdrop for a sweet, frothy love story instead.