In Ad Astra, Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride is the latest space-going protagonist to look into the limitless splendor and wonder of the cosmos and find only a mirror.
Now available for home media, James Gray’s Ad Astra fits right alongside the likes of The Fountain, Interstellar, First Man, and any number of films in which men (it tends to be men) realize that the infinity of space travel is the only possible external canvas on which they can project their internal storms. How well these films work for you, aside from obvious virtues of craft, is going to depend on if the spectacle and the soul are kept in proper balance.
While I know that others had an extremely powerful reaction to Ad Astra, I ultimately found the film to be a deeply frustrating case of gradually diminishing returns. The film’s technical bonafides are above reproach, and Pitt delivers exactly the movie star performance needed to carry such an endeavor, but for all that skill and talent, Ad Astra falls short where it matters most of all.
Roy McBride is as reined-in and closed off a character as Pitt’s Cliff Booth from earlier this year was outgoing and personable. Roy is fastidiously tight-lipped and impersonal, reacting with the same steely-eyed reserve when his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him as he does when he’s plummeting to Earth after the space-tower he was walking on explodes.
Through Roy, we are quickly brought up to speed on the near future that Gray has conceived. Space travel has become a common, commercial enterprise, as has interplanetary travel. One of the most famous figures in this star-blazing landscape is Roy’s father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), who journeyed to the farthest edges of the solar system in the hunt for extraterrestrial life in an expedition known as ‘The Lima Project’. For almost thirty years, Roy has lived with the mystery of his father’s disappearance as an ever-lengthening shadow he seems destined never to escape from.
That changes one day when a mysterious energy surge strikes the Earth and causes massive devastation. Roy’s overseers quickly determine that the source of the energy was the Lima Project, suggesting that Roy’s father is still alive and is now for some reason waging a war against his homeworld. Roy is tasked with traveling to Mars to try and establish contact with his father, a mission that proves harrowing as human threats, hazardous travel conditions, and Roy’s own ambivalence over his father’s reappearance form a perfect storm of dangers.
For the first hour or so, I was locked in with Ad Astra. Gray’s future is refreshingly distinct from either the cartoonish dimensions of a Star Trek disciple or the repulsive aesthetic so popular among dystopias. Without feeling self-consciously ‘gritty’ there’s a sense of lived-in weight and reality to the world Gray builds, loaded with small touches and details that feel true to how humans might react as we start to touch the stars.
Just as an example, without calling a ton of attention to it, Gray insinuates that the expansion of humanity into the stars will lead to a return to popular religious thought. It’s not something anyone explains or addresses, but faith and science are woven closely together in this world, adding a different dynamic to the classic space-faring templates.
Roy’s journey unfolds in episodic fashion, with some of those episodes affording Gray the chance to show off a knack for blockbuster set-pieces. There’s a rover chase and gunfight on the surface of the moon that makes hypnotic beauty out of the lack of gravity and sound, while another scene finds Roy conducting a terrifying search of a seemingly abandoned space craft.
But the longer the film went on, the thinner the underlying emotional and thematic heft seemed to be. Pitt commits hard to Roy’s unerring reserve, but keeping someone that closed off compelling taxes even his limitless supply of charisma. And because Roy doesn’t come off as an especially engaging character, the longer Ad Astra goes on the harder it is to ignore that the film doesn’t have anything especially new to say about fathers, sons, space, or any of the other subjects it tilts at.
There’s also something distressingly familiar in how Gray visualizes space and space travel. While watching Ad Astra, I kept being struck by how closely its vision of bodies moving through stars resembled Interstellar. Turns out, both movies were shot by Hoyte van Hoytema, who ably cribs from his own notebook. Again and again, Gray returns to imagery and ideas already milled by others. An unmoored astronaut scrabbling desperately at their ship as they start to drift away. The broken down, haunted spaceship where the crazed survivor mutters and rambles to themselves. The climatic journey through hallucinogenic storms of light.
It’s not that this material is bad, it just reeks of the familiar. And if you’re going to use the bones of the genre so blatantly, then the skin you apply over those bones needs to work as a compelling, rewarding narrative. If Ad Astra had sent me out in tears over the human story it told by way of stars and space, I’d happily brush aside any other qualms I had about the film.
And to be sure, it’s clear that a sizable number of folks are indeed having that reaction. So take all this with a grain of salt. Ad Astra more than merits a look, if only for how beautifully it has been composed and how across-the-board excellent the performances in it are.
But the longer the film went on, the more I felt myself disengaging from the characters and story. There’s a long sojourn on Mars, and by the time Pitt struck out for the next phase of his journey, I was convinced that the film’s overall merits would be determined almost solely on how well Ad Astra depicted whatever confrontation, or lack thereof, occurred between Pitt and Jones.
Again, I’ve heard from a number of people who were profoundly moved by Ad Astra’s endgame. And I envy them that experience. For me, the film’s climax was a flop, and it sort of sank the whole experience. Pitt puts in a Herculean effort trying to find an external outlet for the character’s interiority, but it’s swallowed up by the film around him.
If Ad Astra differs mightily from its predecessors in the ‘sad man goes to space, remains sad’ subgenre, it’s in the way Gray shrugs off the traditional requirements of genre and emotional transcendence. Ad Astra paints the cosmos with a loving eye, but it also argues that there is nothing to be discovered within the stars that is more valuable than those connections we share between each other as people.
That’s an intriguing thematic spine, but Gray’s script resolutely fails to make any such connections between his characters. Tyler’s entire role is to gaze off camera with an expression of bottomless sorrow, while most every other supporting actor (including a near-cameo by Donald Sutherland and a more intriguing appearance by Ruth Negga) has apparently been directed to deliver their lines in the same earnest, whispered cadence that Pitt deploys.
Ad Astra shrugs at the stargates and event horizons offered by other films, and if it ever got stuck in a room with Interstellar, this film would roll its eyes and make the jerk-off motion whenever that one got on a roll about the intangible but appreciable bonds of love that connect people across time and space.
No, Ad Astra says, we don’t need that stuff. What matters are people, and the things, good and bad, that people choose to share with one another.
But for all that, Ad Astra never gets around to explicating what it is one person might share with someone else. It’s too busy looking in the mirror.