Directed by: James Gray
Runtime: 124 minutes
In his foreword to the novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey (written in parallel with Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1968 film version), British author Sir Arthur C. Clarke describes how many stars constitute the Milky Way galaxy – approximately one hundred billion – and how this unfathomably large number also happens to correspond rather neatly to the number of human beings who have walked the Earth, both living and dead:
“Every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many—perhaps most—of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven—or hell. How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.”
It’s this quest—one of overcoming that barrier of distance and boldly venturing into the shoreless void of space—that drives James Gray’s sci-fi epic Ad Astra (Latin for ‘to the stars’). Envisioning what this next generation of Clarke’s might actually accomplish, Gray (The Lost City of Z, The Immigrant) constructs his film out of breathtaking visuals, both stellar and man-made in origin, frequently evoking a sense of awe and contemplation: an “international space antenna” array, stretching from the Earth’s surface into low orbit; a sprawling Moon complex, complete with capitalist retail ephemera, borderland disputes and rover skirmishes; a subterranean Martian bunker, infused with burning hues of gloom; interlocking space capsules, home to dangers both human and non-human; voyages past the swirling gases of Jupiter and the crystalline ring systems of Saturn and Neptune. And while Gray and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar) have clearly taken the time to painstakingly render the solar system in all its majestic, sublime splendour, the film’s main concern is more cerebral and psychological: namely the fragility of the human psyche when faced with the indifferent silence of the cosmos. To quote Nietzsche: “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Ad Astra takes place in a near-future, centred on the career of Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut for the United States Space Command, known as SpaceComm. Roy is living in the shadow of his father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a highly-decorated and revered commander of humanity’s only deep-space mission to the outer planets. The senior McBride was tasked with venturing beyond the boundary of our Sun’s heliosphere, in order to capture images of extra-solar planets and find answers to the ultimate question of human existence: Are we alone in the universe? After this mission goes dark somewhere out near Neptune, while Roy is still a teenager, his father is presumed dead along with his entire crew.
However, while we never see this earlier mission, or Roy as a young child, the effects of this childhood abandonment reverberate throughout the film. We’re introduced to Roy as a grizzled, seasoned astronaut, following admirably in his father’s footsteps. As he struggles to come to overcome his daddy issues, Roy has learned to repress his true feelings, pushing away his wife as a result, all so he can become one of SpaceComm’s most valuable assets; smart, capable and forever calm under pressure. When a series of large, roaming electrical storms hit Earth and the inner planets, nearly killing Roy in the process, his superiors recruit him for a classified mission and reveal their grim suspicions: they’ve traced the origin of the storms to disturbances surrounding Neptune and believe his father to be the cause. Tasked with travelling to a secure communications outpost on Mars via the Moon, Roy must establish contact with his estranged father in order to save humanity and the fate of the solar system.
In Ad Astra, space is a dangerous and hostile environment, where death follows Roy at every turn. Gray’s pacing moves briskly from set-piece to set-piece, frantically revealing a cast of talented yet under-utilised supporting actors and actresses (Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, John Ortiz, Liv Tyler), using narrative momentum to generate a palpable sense of isolation and alienation. Pitt’s portrayal of McBride is graceful and restrained, filling every frame with thousand-yard stares and a hardened, taciturn resolve. As numerous bodies begin to pile up, the film impassively registers each loss, unceremoniously pushing corpses out of airlocks into the cold, hard vacuum of space; a virtually limitless graveyard, littered with the scattered debris of human colonisation. Most of the film’s strengths come about through Roy’s journey, borrowed heavily from classic literary tales like Homer’s The Odyssey and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, along with its obvious cinematic reference point in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Gray’s world-building is gritty, lived-in and, at times, tongue-in-cheek (keep your eyes peeled for the subtle jab at low-cost airlines). In his pursuit to create “the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie,” Gray, as both director, producer and co-writer of the film, comes remarkably close.
Where Ad Astra suffers, however, is in the connective tissue between its two principal characters. For all of Pitt’s talent in making Roy’s character relatable, the film errs with an over-reliance on gratuitous voiceover, going to great lengths to spell out every single facet of Roy’s emotional state. Some of this passes for world-building (SpaceComm astronauts are required to make regular psych evaluations through an AI, in order to pass to certain mission stages or to be granted high-level clearance), at least in the beginning, and yet by the film’s conclusion it feels mostly like a bad-writing crutch. This is somewhat disappointing given that recent standout sci-fi efforts have either utilised voiceover to enhance overall narrative resonance (2016’s Arrival) or eschewed the device completely (2017’s Blade Runner 2049; 2018’s Annihilation) to great effect. Ultimately, the use of voiceover closes down any attempt to truly understand and empathise with Roy’s rationale on our own terms. As the old adage goes: “Show, don’t tell.”
This issue compounds further as Ad Astra hurtles towards its resolution and the inevitable confrontation between Roy and his father; the devoted son, desperately looking to the stars for fatherly approval, and his father as a spectral antagonist and Conradian Kurtz-like figure. Sci-fi films with similar scope, like the aforementioned 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar, ultimately hinge on risky third acts, further developing extra-terrestrial settings and pushing their characters into fantastical scenarios. While Ad Astra’s conclusion is certainly more grounded in scientific realism, it feels underhanded in comparison to the strong worldbuilding and narrative stakes already established. We don’t really get a sense of why Roy’s journey was actually worth it, for him or in the grand scheme of things. Even at the edge of the known frontier, facing impossible odds and near-certain death, Roy seems to deal with it all like it’s just another day at the office.
A possible factor here may be that Ad Astra had its release date pushed back twice this year, most notably as a consequence of the recent Disney/Fox merger, and the internet abounds with rumours of reshoots after lack-lustre test screenings. Certainly, the reliance of voiceover to exposit on every detail of the story seems like a possibly last-minute, studio-influenced decision. One wonders what earlier cuts of the film may have looked like, perhaps closer to Gray’s original vision. These minor quibbles aside, Ad Astra remains a beautiful and visually-stunning film. The set-pieces and expansive world-building are well worth the price of admission alone, even if the narrative arc feels all too rote by the end. Alongside other exceptional films like Claire Denis’ High-Life and Damien Chazelle’s First Man, 2019 is proving to be a banner year for original, thought-provoking sci-fi.
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