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Article by Nathan Hurlbut
Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) has lived his life following in his father’s footsteps, similarly becoming an astronaut like H. Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), who is revered the world over for his pioneering space travels. Clifford’s last mission, dubbed “The Lima Project,” was a voyage to Neptune in pursuit of finding evidence of intelligent life in the universe, and ended with Earth losing contact with the entire crew sixteen years ago.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, a recent series of antimatter energy bursts originating from Neptune is causing havoc and threatening the planet’s entire human population. The American military believe Roy’s father is still alive and perhaps responsible for these massive energy disruptions. They enlist Roy to travel out into space in an attempt to communicate with his long absent father and save the Earth’s population from possible destruction.
The entire film is narrated by Pitt’s character of Roy, and his introspective voice-over is both intimately personal and thoughtfully meditative. It suggests a protagonist who has wandered in from a Terrence Malick movie who, rather than traveling into unfamiliar territory in a historical setting in movies like The New World (2005) and The Thin Red Line (1998), is voyaging through our solar system instead. Pitt’s air of resignation contributes to the film’s atmosphere of blunted emotions, a degree of personal repression that relates as much to the film’s climax as saving the entire planet’s population from extinction.
It’s this combination of the vastness of outer space and the inner emotional state of Roy himself that makes the movie such a fascinating experience. There are plenty of awe-inspiring set pieces on a grand scale, such as Roy’s plummet from an impossibly tall antenna tower that serves as humanity’s attempt to communicate with extra-terrestrials. Roy’s spinning free fall immediately recalls the frightening degree of vertigo achieved in Alfonos Cuaron’s stunning Gravity (2013) that equally conveyed the disorientation and dangers that travelling beyond the Earth’s atmosphere entails.
Meanwhile Roy’s travel itinerary involves stops on our moon, the planet Mars, and then a prolonged journey to his final destination of Neptune that beautifully conveys the wondrous nature of space travel. The moon voyage is portrayed for its passengers as routine as an airline flight, while the base of Mars becomes an fascinating and mysterious environment, full of secrets and potential menace.
Director James Gray provides a degree of commentary on these events as well, as commercial franchises threaten to turn the moon into a strip mall, and a space flight request for a “sleep package” entails an additional $125 charge. By combining our own sense of awe at the wondrous possibilities of space travel with the mundane realities of commercialization, Gray nicely comments on humanity’s (or, perhaps more accurately, capitalism’s) continuing desire to exploit the natural world for its own personal gain.
At the same time, Ad Astra is as much a personal journey as a science fiction story. For Roy, it becomes a struggle to confront his own personal failings as an individual by similarly confronting his father’s own nature and deal with Clifford’s potential “space madness” that threatens the destruction of Earth itself. By using these parallel story concerns, the movie manages to encompass both humanity in general and humanity specifically, giving the movie a grand sense of scope without sacrificing a level of intimacy as well.
It’s revealed at one point in the movie that Roy’s heart rate has never been recorded at higher than 80 beats per minute, and admittedly, the film’s slow pace frequently makes it feel like it will achieve the same result in its viewers. Fortunately, screenwriters Gray and Ethan Gross occasionally punctuate the movie with adrenaline-fueled set scenes like an encounter with a disable Norwegian spaceship that features hostile inhabitants, or a pirate shootout on the surface of the moon. The surprising nature of these events happening in an environment outside our atmosphere are both imaginative and thrilling, helping to balance out the film’s stately pace nicely.
Many viewers will probably find Ad Astra a bit too contemplative for its own good, as far removed from a Star Wars (1977) space adventure as humanly possible. However, like some of the best science fiction films, Ad Astra conveys a solemn and existential mood completely appropriate for the vast expanse of outer space. Ultimately, the movie beautifully suggests that while it may be a lonely universe out there, it only reinforces the worldly concern that we all need to count on each other back here on Earth.
Rated PG-13.