‘Per Aspera Ad Astra’
The premise of a decades-long hibernation to endure an interstellar trip is pretty familiar at this point, but Han Yan’s demented epic adds a great wrinkle: To prevent the sleeping travelers’ brains from atrophying, they are kept active with incredibly vivid dreams.
When something goes wrong during a ship’s journey, the first to be alerted is the dream administrator Xu Tianbiao (Dylan Wang) — he’s the equivalent of an I.T. specialist watching over a large-scale computer network and able to log into everybody’s interface. Xu and the captain, Li Simeng (Victoria Song), are battling Ge Yang (Duo Wang), who has decided to be the godlike overseer of a never-ending dream. “Real or not, does that matter?” he asks.
“Per Aspera Ad Astra” — which also involves classic space-opera tropes like desperately trying to make it through a meteorite shower — eventually drags in rogue artificial intelligence. But its best scenes are the ones taking place in the passengers’ hallucinatory dreamscapes, with Han doling out an astounding amount of eye-popping visuals and directorial flourishes. The movie contains multitudes. You can have a fancy analysis theorizing simulations as technology’s answer to dreams. Or you can just sit down, relax and wonder why we can’t have badass-looking guns that shoot strawberries and doughnuts in slow motion.
Those familiar with Dan Gutman’s popular “My Weird School” book series know that the teachers are just as important as the kids. So it goes in Jonathan Judge’s film, in which three best friends, A.J. (Hero Hunter), Lex (Harper Zilmer) and Ryan (Aaron Harris), are only as entertaining as the staff of Mid Dell Middle School. Fortunately for viewers — maybe less for the students, who are under attack — said staff is possessed by aliens.
Our goofball trio acquires unlikely allies in their fight, including the gym teacher, Mr. Small (Adam Rose), and a repeat 8th grader, Todd (the TikTok magician Sean Sotaridona), who is basically a descendant of Jeff Spicoli, from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Judge maintains a good pace throughout, sustained by a soundtrack of wall-to-wall pop-punk songs, and several gags have a surreal quality, as when we discover the aliens’ space ship. With kids now out of school, this is a good way for a family to share a couple of hours.
In Aaron Silverstein’s film, a race of extraterrestrial beings appears to be mere consciousness. So when they get to Earth, they need to find host bodies. When a body dies, they just get another — reincarnation, alien-style. At first it’s tough going for Vel (Peace Ikediuba), whose husk suffers from asthma. Still, getting used to her body’s physical limitations is not as hard as discovering how her appearance affects how others act around her. As a woman, she is the target of unwanted attention at a bar; as a Black person, she is eyed with suspicion by a manager when browsing at a convenience store.
Vel runs into a fellow alien, the chain-smoking Mauro (Circus-Szalewski), who teaches her some basics of the human condition. More important, he introduces her to his grand project of creating pictograms for their native language. We gradually discover that Vel and Mauro’s encounter may not have been fortuitous, but Vel’s ultimate agenda is less interesting than the issues of identity and consciousness that the film raises. How do we know that we are real? What does it even mean to exist? These may well be the most common questions in contemporary science fiction.
When a mysterious, unnamed man (Sam Rockwell) barges into a diner and announces it’s his 117th visit, he does not mean that he eats there a lot, but that he is from the future and keeps coming back to try to stop the looming artificial-intelligence Armageddon. If this were a time-loop story, Gore Verbinski’s movie would also show us several of the man’s other visits. Instead it sticks to the 117th, inserting mini-narratives about some of the people the visitor enrolls in his mission to create the exact right team to change the future. Like, for example, Susan (Juno Temple), whose son was killed in a school shooting and replaced with a clone, or Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to technology.
There are some inventive — and dark-minded — developments here, and “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” builds to a crescendo that brings to mind Terry Gilliam’s mix of fantasy and social commentary. Of course, the movie displays even more awareness of the all-conquering powers of a technology that cuts us off from both reality and our basic humanity. And while the movie is overlong, a lot can be forgiven when surprises — and rats — keep coming.
The Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia is a bit like a hybrid of Luc Besson and Ruben Ostlund: a director with a penchant for the fantastical who uses “what if?” scenarios to paint bleak portraits of a vacant, corrupt, dog-eat-dog society. “Rich Flu” is not as harsh as Gaztelu-Urrutia’s breakthrough, “The Platform,” but it does ask provocative questions.
Her name a likely allusion to “Twin Peaks,” Laura Palmer (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a high-ranking executive who hobnobs with the rich and powerful. One of them is Sebastian Snail Sr. (Timothy Spall), a tycoon who puts her in charge of his new philanthropy division. This gives Laura an even better seat when a new virus targets the wealthy and the social elites. An early symptom is the sudden appearance of blindingly white teeth (possibly a very European joke about the American taste for whiteners and veneers), and next thing you know, people start lying about their net worth. “Rich Flu” never quite explores this amazing premise to its fullest, and often descends into incoherence, but it also has a blithe, devil-may-care cynicism that kept me watching. Gaztelu-Urrutia could have made an action movie à la “Contagion” but this is more an allegorical dark comedy, with Laura at one point a refugee on a boat, trying to cross the Mediterranean. As it turns out, money does not solve everything.
