It is beautiful, giving space a feeling of tangibility, but it is not for everyone. With a set jaw and creased eyes, he draws us into his inner world.īut the most remarkable thing about Ad Astra is that it exists at all, or maybe just that James Gray (who in addition to directing the film, co-wrote its screenplay with Fringe writer Ethan Gross) managed to raise enough money to make it. Ad Astra is a wonderful film, but it sure is deadly serious - and Pitt is playing a man whose apparent depression renders him almost devoid of emotion for long stretches. It’s a strong turn for Pitt, one where he can’t lean on his considerable comedic chops. Most other characters are short-lived on-screen figures in space, you’re mostly alone, especially if you prefer to be left that way. He carries nearly the whole film on his shoulders. Ad Astra gives a distinctly modern answer to man’s search for Godīrad Pitt is having an excellent year, between his role as an enigmatic stuntman in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and now Ad Astra. Roy, with unreadable affect, agrees to go and boards a commercial flight for the moon, the first leg of his trip. So they tell Roy they want to send him to the US outpost on Mars to try to make contact. They think Roy might be able to establish contact with him. The military now believes that Cliff is alive and triggering the pulses from somewhere near Neptune. Cliff was searching for extraterrestrial intelligence he left when Roy was 16 and then disappeared entirely from communication with Earth when Roy was 29, well over a decade ago. They have reason to suspect that the source of the pulses, which seem to be coming from deep space, may be Cliff, Roy’s father, who never returned from a mission into deep space years earlier. He’s on track to spend the rest of his days as a dependable, decorated public servant.īut then mysterious electric pulses start to rock the Earth, wreaking havoc on equipment and life on Earth as well as at outposts on the moon and Mars. He narrates his life to himself - we’re privy to his thoughts but nobody else is - and yet rarely says anything unnecessary out loud.
We get the distinct impression he’s closed himself off to the world and possibly depressed. Roy is devoted to his job, which currently involves working on the International Space Antenna, a giant structure that extends from the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere and into space. The International Space Antenna in Ad Astra. (No, it is not called the “ Space Force.”) Roy is stoic and unemotional to a fault, with a heart rate that rarely rises above 80 and an ex-wife named Eve (Liv Tyler) whom he drove away with his inability to be “present” with her, even when they were in the same room. Ad Astra focuses instead on his son, Roy McBride (Pitt), who has followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming an astronaut and a major in the space division of the US military. In Ad Astra, he’s an astronaut in the near future as the film’s title cards explain, man’s ruthless consumption of Earth’s resources has forced him to look elsewhere for the species’ future. In The Lost City of Z, the adventurer is Victorian and the film’s protagonist. He craves the experience of transcendence: to move beyond his world and see it as a bigger place, without the strictures placed on him by the culture and religion he was raised in.” The way I described that explorer in my review works, almost verbatim, as a description of Ad Astra’s Cliff McBride (Tommy Lee Jones): He “feels earthbound by his ancestors but longs for something greater, some experience that defies definition, to discover something beyond what his own civilization has managed to produce. Ad Astra is about a man looking for his father, and a lot moreĭirector James Gray’s last film, the 2017 epic The Lost City of Z, was also about an explorer and his son. Nor is it untrodden territory for prestige cinema in just the last few years, both Martin Scorsese’s Silence and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed have told stories about a God who goes silent.īut Ad Astra may be unique in its metaphorical approach, in how it answers the questions it raises, and in what it’s doing with those answers.
That’s not an unusual subject for science fiction to tackle even when it isn’t specifically about an entity called God, sci-fi often deals with the idea of transcendence, of feeling dwarfed by a world that extends far beyond our naked eyes. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
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