Ad Astra ★★★½
THE best recent films about space travel have been more grounded than most human dramas.
First Man was in large part about a father’s love for his daughter, similarly Interstellar a father’s love for his family and Arrival a woman’s love for her child.
On the flip side we’ve had films like Gravity and The Martian that have focused on the exhiliration of the space experience within a thriller/drama framework.
The latest example, Ad Astra, attempts to do both and for the most part succeeds.
Brad Pitt is very good as astronaut Roy McBride who undertakes a mission to uncover the truth about his father, H. Clifford McBride, a decorated former astronaut long presumed dead but who might be part of a threat to Earth.
Along the path of his existential journey of discovery Roy has a dramatic free-fall from a huge radio tower, takes part in a car chase and shootout on the moon and has an anti-gravity fist and knife fight and horrifying encounter with a science experiment gone wrong.
These scenes are extremely well executed and exciting to watch in isolation, but they don’t necessarily fit the rest of the tone, atmosphere and pacing of the film which is more interested in the relationship between Roy and his father and the reasons for Clifford’s estrangement from not just his family but all humanity.
At its best, Ad Astra is visually stunning, thought-provoking and quite moving; at it’s worst it keeps stopping to take part in Flash Gordon-like adventure and action sequences that take you far from the over-arching Apocalypse Now style descent into man’s heart of darkness.
Reading this, Ad Astra is actually sounding better, primarily because you get two decent types of film for the price of one.
Whenever Roy’s story starts to lag, there’s always a shoot-out or chase to have you sitting back up in the cinema recliner.
Under-rated writer/director James Gray (Little Odessa, We Own The Night, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) arguably took the same approach with his last film back in 2016, The Lost City of Z, which is rightly highly-rated by many critics.
For Ad Astra, Gray is supported by a technical team that makes sure the film looks and sounds wonderful as the story effortlessly moves from Earth to the Moon via commercial space travel, onto Mars and then pushes into the far reaches of the universe near Neptune.
It’s photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema who first came to the attention with Let The Right One In (2008) and has since shot films like Interstellar, Spectre and Dunkirk.
The production designer, the creative talent behind the look of the film, is Kevin Thompson (Birdman) and the visual effects are headed by Brian Adler (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Hollywood, John Wick 3, Avengers: Endgame). Every cent of the budget is plain to see and constantly captivates the viewer.
On-screen the film belongs to Pitt who brings to the role a combination of quiet determination and professionalism hiding a fragility that may be either broken or fixed by meeting the father, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who inspired him to become the man he is while spurning him in pursuit of his personal dreams and philosophical commitments.
Overall, Ad Astra may not be as accomplished as the other films mentioned in this review, but it’s a significant achievement that manages to produce deeply moving and giddily entertaining sequences.