Brad Pitt Space Flick ‘Ad Astra’ Is Awe-inspiring & Absurd

AD ASTRA

★★★1/2

And you thought Star Lord had interstellar daddy issues. In James Gray’s long-awaited space-opera Ad Astra, Tommy Lee Jones is the ultimate absent-father: one who disappeared on a deep-space mission near Neptune 19 years ago. His son, astronaut Brad Pitt, is recruited to fly to Mars and recite a Dear Daddy letter that’ll be beamed Across The Universe, hopefully reaching the father our heroic protagonist once thought lost. Oh, and the fate of all life on Earth is on the line.

“Is this very difficult for you, son, this being about your father?” asks Donald Sutherland, who shows up for a reel as another quasi-father-figure, white-haired and wise but ultimately disappointing. It’s an unintentionally-funny foregrounding of a theme which is delivered with sledgehammer subtlety. Rather than revelling in the silent poetry of the cosmos, Gray often errs towards the explicatory; from the boundless walking-the-audience-through-things dialogue to Pitt’s overloaded narration (“What happened to my dad? What did he find out there? Did it break him? Or was he already broken?”).

Ad Astra, in such, delivers an action-movie’s this-time-it’s-personal plot splattered on the grand canvas of space travel. After a run of films set amongst lowlifes in New York —most starring Joaquin Phoenix— Gray has radically reconfigured the scale, scope, and setting of his films. First came The Lost City Of Z, a journey into the dark heart of the Amazon that was at once old-fashioned matinée and experiential cine-reverie on obsessive yearning. Here, Gray again leans on Heart Of Darkness, though instead of heading upriver, he’s heading out amongst the stars.

Given this setting, it’s undoubtable that elements of Ad Astra evoke past cinematic visions of space: the POV action/reaction/chain-reaction of Gravity, the grand emo projections of Interstellar, the memory/dream/hallucination reveries of Solaris, the love of reflective surfaces of 2001: A Space Odyssey. For many, the dustblown, burnt-orange visions of Mars will summon the Earthbound Blade Runner 2049 (when we hit Neptune, though, blue is beautiful).

And there’s even a whole sequence, which sadly is all too easily spoiled (if you’ve already seen Ad Astra, or really want a hint, though: well...), in which a distress call from a space-station is answered, and the eerie, fearful investigation is duly indebted to Alien. Also ruffling the tone — but bringing genuine thrills — is a moon-buggy car-chase on the lunar surface, in which action-movie tropes are made artful, uncanny by taking place in a muffled half-silence. And the opening, a go-pro-evoking freefall from the upper-atmosphere after an accident on an ‘international space antenna’, is so thrillingly-executed and exciting that Tom Cruise is filled with envy.

These sequences stand out because they’re in contrast with a film that is, otherwise, incredibly earnest and weirdly religious; a sincere father/son relationship movie that just happens to take place in space.

When Gray announced Ad Astra, his initial goal was to make “the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie”, and there’s delight to be found in the details. Commercial travel to the Moon is perfectly judged, in both tone and logistics. On Mars there’s blowing litter and a stray dog. I found myself drawn to the various warning signs that turn up in space stations, shuttles, on launch sites; especially when they’re dirtied, worn by time.

But that sense of realism is overwhelmed by a central storyline (not to mention a nonsensical space-shuttle fight or Pitt’s ease of moving through space) that strains credulity. In reaching for something mythic, masculine, and therapy-session with its central dear-daddy drama, the details get lost.

Which leaves us with a film that’s at once awe-inspiring and absurd, a journey to the stars that’s less philosophical, more (and more and more) sentimental. Some of Gray’s visions — Pitt pulling himself by chain through an underground lake on Mars, grappling gloves reflected in his helmet’s gold visor—  are incredible. But some of his lines — “I never cared about you or your mother or your small ideas,” deadbeat dad pronounces — are pretty on-the-nose.

In a year in which great intergalactic movies have gone glibly existential (Swedish masterpiece Aniara) or gleefully perverse (Claire Denis’s fuckbox-boasting High Life), Ad Astra plays more like the cinematic equivalent of Cat’s In The Cradle.