Rated: M
Directed by: James Gray
Written by: James Gray & Ethan Gross
Produced by: Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, p.g.a., Jeremy Kleiner, p.g.a., James Gray, p.g.a., Anthony Katagas, p.g.a., Rodrigo Teixeira, p.g.a., Arnon Milchan
Starring: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, and Donald Sutherland.
‘I will not be vulnerable,’ says Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) in a monologue that threads the story of the film together; it’s a voice that measures the thought processing behind those blue eyes with green specks. A thought-process hidden, because the person Roy shows to others is a performance, ‘my eye always on the exit.’
Set in the near future, Ad Astra is a mystery set in space, the story based in commercialised space travel to the moon, to rockets that blast toward the human inhabitants of Mars, to go further, for Roy to reach Neptune in search of his father who began the Lima Project thirty years before; his father’s purpose: to find evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
Instead of science fiction and the practicalities of space travel or even the exploration of physics to understand human existence, Ad Astra, at its heart, is a drama.
There was plenty of opportunity to get technical, but the film skips over the science behind the impending disaster from outer space so the story jumps while the movement in space is slow and calculated.
So although there’s a disturbing beauty to the tense moments of guns fired from space rovers and visually stunning scenes of a reflection of darkness across the orange visor of a helmet that looks like a faceless being, I felt like the story was missing the factual backbone to hold up the idea of the mysterious father figure who has dedicated his life to science and space exploration.
Ad Astra is not a journey into space but for Roy to find his way back to humanity.
The story circles around to give some satisfaction, to be able to, Let go.
And there’s so much going for the film with the build of tension with the low vibrating soundtrack of a siren; with those crime thriller moments set in space with the slow danger of being in an environment with toxic air, without gravity – in a place no other living Being has ever been found.
But for me, those amazing moments of suspense combined with the beauty of space on the big screen would have been so much more astounding if the story dug just a bit deeper into the physics of the environment – that would have made the film more believable while adding that extra layer to the drama of the story.
Still, an interesting change in pace that adds a mysterious twist to the thriller genre.