Ad Astra: Cor Tenebrae edit

Very nice edit. Recommend

I sort of stumbled into this edit as I saw a review that was posted. This was a movie I intended to watch for a second time, but was hesitant because I felt it was bloated and filled with too many distractions. I knew there was a solid movie in the theatrical if only much of the excess was removed.

Overall, my review will avoid reiterating almost the exact sentiments of the two prior reviews of this edit by redbeard and jasonflippey. In summary, the editor did an excellent job of condensing the movie to make the focus on internal psychological struggle and the dynamics of difficult family relationships mixed in with a fun space movie. The rescoring of the film helped elevate the emotional impact.

I will discuss in more detail what other reviews did not touch upon - the ending. I fully agreed that Roy surviving by using a nuclear blast was completely absurd. That cut was the correct decision. However, the editor cleverly edited the ending in a craftily ambiguous manner. We see Roy floating in space juxtaposed with images of him reuniting with his estranged wife. Was this meant to convey he survived, or was it simply an illusion in his mind for the ideal life he wished for? Perhaps that open-ended close to the movie was deliberate to allow the viewer to decide. The closing music was also very powerful and gets your emotions swirling. Regardless of the editor's intent, I have always been a huge fan of movies that have these ambiguous endings that really put the viewer in a position to think about different scenarios. Nothing wrong with using your brain!

I want to thank the editor for sharing the edit with me. I enjoyed it and definitely believe others will as well. Strongly recommended.

I came across this fan edit after first seeing the movie in the theater and coming away baffled at how long and how meandering the theatrical versions turned out to be. Moon Pirates? Voice Overs? Space Surfing? This movie had the potential of being a great story about a man being so driven by being abandoned by his father and turning his fear and sorrow into his work to the degree that he lost his ability to touch base with humanity, only to find it again in the solitude of long term space travel in an effort to find and save his father. What he got instead was a overly long movie that didn't know if it wanted to be an action film, a film about losing a spouse due to coldness, or a space adventure.

This fan edit is a wonderful change from the above and created a whole new vision for the film. Now we have an astronaut, so caught up in the pain and loss of his father abandoning him as a child, that he is unable to connect with his wife due to driving that pain and loss into his work. With the opportunity to perhaps find his father, who he thought was dead, and bring him back home, and in the process reconnect with his own humanity and rekindle the relationship with his wife before it's too late, we have a movie that's streamlined and tells a straightforward story.

The fan editing in this edition is utterly flawless. The visuals are perfect as is the audio editing. The choice to rescore the movie for this fan edit was a bold but correct choice and serves it extremely well. Simply put, I feel this is how the movie was meant to be before the filmmakers got sidetracked in the editing room, making far too many baffling editing decisions that lost the focus of the story.

This is now my go to for this film, with the theatrical version being a companion piece only in how not to make the movie. If I could give this fan edit a score higher than 10 across the board, I would, but failing that, I can't recommend this fan edit enough. Well done.

This is a near perfect fix of a movie that I would never have considered re-watching. I found so much of the original to be strange and uncompelling, and I actually wondered if he was autistic rather than abandoned. I mean I suppose it could be both but in this cut his closed off disconnected nature clearly comes from his father's abandonment, as I'm sure it was intended to be.

I have nothing to add regarding the actual editing because it is technically perfect. The only thing I noticed, which I'm not sure if it was in the original, was a reused shot of him kicking his leg floating asleep during the 80-day trip to Neptune.

Putting in the effort to actually go read a book to inform your decisions on the narrative was above and beyond, and it shows. Even your rationalization for keeping the monkey part (a bit which I personally found completely ludicrous) made it somehow valuable to the overall experience. I doubt there would be a way to edit it out anyway given the Captain's fate but somehow it made more sense in your cut.

Also I can't tell you how happy I was to see that you removed the moon pirates. Like come on now, how would they even exist. They just have to wait for a car to come by so they can scavenge air?? Get outta here.

Overall you took a movie that annoyed, bored, and somewhat angered me and you actually made it into something I would watch for a now-third time. Well done!

This was near perfection for me… What an experience the film becomes, with this edit!

Other reviewers have talked here about the plot changes, which definitely worked for me. I’d highlight the removal of the pirate attack (why and how would that even work…), the gun firing (they should know why that’s a bad idea in the first place…) and the rest of the scene around it, because the way it’s edited now changes the character building for the better.
Most importantly, the removal of the “shock wave surfing” at the end, which was baffling for me. I mean, do the original authors even though for 1 second about physics… And the new ending, it really works like this.

The highpoint of the edit is, without a doubt, the score. It reminded me of another fanedit, “Annihilation - Noitalihinna” (by The Scribbling Man) which was also trying to rescore the film to recover the theme of the original story/book.

The audio experience is now, throughout the entire film, haunting, melancholic, evocative, poignant, discomfiting, ethereal… It both elevates and guides the story and the feelings evoked by it.

Let me say it: when I watched the original film before, I decided that I never needed to watch it again, it had too many flaws in-between the good parts. Now, I predict I’ll rewatch this version a number of times, probably after any sci-fi film that tries and fails to do what this fanedit now does: to tell a science fiction story that is more about looking thoughtfully to ourselves than anything else.