Movie Review: Sad Brad Seeks Dad In "Ad Astra", a Man-Cry Extravaganza

In space, no one can hear you sob "daddy".

Fifty years after man first landed on the moon comes Ad Astra, an existential space epic with the lofty aspirations of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the common sense to enliven proceedings with moon pirates and feral zero-gravity apes.

Brad Pitt stars as Major Roy McBride, an emotionally detached astronaut clocking in and out on an international space satellite above Earth. In the opening scenes, he falls off the structure and miraculously survives the landing, but still can’t appreciate his life or the lives of those around him. That earns him the attention of his superiors, so they set him on a covert mission to recover his father, the heroic Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), who ventured out to Jupiter and may or may not be responsible for electrical storms wreaking havoc on our planet. It’ll involve Roy leaving everything and going farther than anyone—besides his dad—has ever gone before. He responds neutrally. (In David Bowie’s "Space Oddity", the intrepid Major Tom told his wife he loved her very much. Major Roy, facing catastrophe, would probably just tell his wife "hello".)

Director James Gray’s last film, The Lost City of Z, wondered what happened to real-life explorer Percy Fawcett, who plunged into uncharted territory to locate a hidden Amazonian world. He did so by abandoning his family, and once again, Gray makes that compulsion a focus in Ad Astra. Often, it feels a bit like a space-set remake of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, where Pitt played the seething father. This time, Pitt’s the one elliptically narrating his conflicted emotional state, pondering why his own dad untethered himself from home. And as he jumps from the Moon to Mars to his final destination, Ad Astra recalls Apocalypse Now as well, with the mysterious Clifford awaiting Roy like the unhinged Colonel Kurtz atop his makeshift throne upriver.

The homages are surely all intentional. (In fact, Roy's commercial flight from the Earth to the Moon via Virgin Galactic specifically references the funniest sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001). However, Ad Astra explores its own uncharted territory too, in a most peculiar way. Set in the near future, it satirises an American-colonised moon base, where conflict nonetheless rages and "pirates" attempt to commandeer Roy’s rover en route to a government facility. Later, Roy and fellow astronauts respond to an SOS and encounter a spaceship overrun by animals. Sure, screenwriters Gray and Ethan Gross are punctuating their emotional drama with moments of scintillating space action to keep us invested, yet they add up to establish the enormous question on Roy’s mind: Is humanity really worth saving?

I won’t spoil what Roy discovers at the end of his voyage, yet Ad Astra finds immense power and meaning in its nihilism. As we learn, Clifford initially set off to discover intelligent life, and though no one explicitly says it, the religious allusions throughout suggest he was really looking for God. That puts Roy on a similar trajectory, and if the 'dad as a metaphor for God' angle inspires eye rolls, the weighty presence of Jones (deployed minimally) and the stoic, sturdy Pitt give it great heft.

Did I mention it looks unbelievable? Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (of Her and Interstellar) is an expert in clinical sheen who doesn’t undercut the emotion at the heart of his directors’ tales. The experimental and impressive sound design, like the movie itself, finds a way to marry scientific fidelity (like: silence in space) with the conventions of boom-crash blockbusters (having the requisite explosions, gun shots and, umm, ape howls come through via the characters’ radio headsets). It’s a grand, surreal feat of technical filmmaking. We’ll credit Gray for pulling the disparate threads of Kubrick, Malick, Bowie and even Michael Bay into its own unique knot. He really made the grade.

4/5

Ad Astra is rated M for science fiction themes, violence and coarse language.