Film Review: Ad Astra

Sexuality/Nudity Acceptable
Violence Mature 
Vulgarity Mature
Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

I've always said that if you want to sound smart to people, either quote them Latin or Shakespeare.  The makers of this movie desperately want to sound smart.  To the Stars didn't sound pretentious enough, so they Latinized the title: Ad Astra.


The film centers around Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an emotionally walled-off astronaut in the not-too distant future.  A calamity befalls the people of earth and the powers that be think that the source of the problem is Roy's father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones).  Clifford went on a mission to Neptune and from there seek out intelligent life outside of the solar system.  SpaceCom lost all contact with the expedition decades earlier, but they have reason to believe that some kind of energy wave is emanating from their ship and affecting Earth.  Roy is tasked to go to Mars to make radio contact with his long-lost father and see if they can resolve this crisis.

I don't know what it is about space movies that brings out the pretension in directors.  This movie desperately wants to be 2001: A Space Odyssey.  To be sure, writer/director James Gray does some fine visual work.  But the space opera feels like it is trying too hard to be lofty.  Even the great Christopher Nolan fumbled a little with his finale to Interstellar.  Gray wants to make a movie with big themes, sweeping emotions and potent visuals.  But he forgets that first and foremost he is telling a story.  And none of those other things matter if you do not have characters that you want to follow. 

There is absolutely nothing interesting about Roy.  He is a block of wood in a space suit.  That is not an insult to Pitt's performance.  I am sure he was told to play the part of someone with the emotional depth of a thimble.  I suppose this was meant to show how Roy's abandonment as a child has stunted his full emotional growth.  Donald Sutherland has an extended cameo as a friend of Clifford, but he exits the movie too soon to have any impact.  The movie builds to our potential reunion between Roy and his father, but everything about it is hollow.

The world-building is excellent.  In fact, it is so good that you almost wish they would jettison the main story and explore some of the side ones.  Usually in good writing, you create a detailed environment for the story to take place in, while explicit showing only about 10% of the foundation that you imagined.  But the story that is told in this movie isn't worth telling.  Some of the fascinating tidbits include commercial trips to the moon, where it has been colonized.  But factions have broken things down in some areas like the Old West.  When traveling beyond safe borders, moon pirates attack travelers for supplies.  Also, there is a space ship that is in distress because the baboons being used for research animals escaped and started eating the crew.  All of these things are much more interesting than what we end up watching.

One of the things that the film tries to capture is the tedium of space travel and the long loneliness that it engenders.  While this is interesting on paper, it was unenjoyable in execution.  You begin to feel like a child in a long car ride, waiting for it to end. 

One of the other annoying things was how the film used religion.  Many movies about the future remove all mention of Christianity, seemingly under the assumption that humans will outgrow religion.  So it would have been refreshing to see that a movie recognizes the deeply rooted religious instinct in human beings.  But any good will is undercut by the cliched use of religiosity as a sign of irrationality.  Whenever a character speaks of God or prays in the movie, you know that they are either crazy or stupid.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

One of the most frustrating things about the movie is how pointless all of it is.  When contact is finally made with Clifford, Roy is not allowed to go on the mission from Mars to Neptune because of his emotional connection.  He fears that the ones they are sending will simply nuke his father's ship and call it a day.  So Roy sneaks onto the ship and during the struggle, all three of the other astronauts are killed.  Instead of Roy realizing that he made a mistake, he caries on for months through space alone to Neptune.  When he gets there, he decides to nuke the ship anyway and his father commits suicide in a moment where Roy has to literally let him go that is about a subtle as a sledgehammer.  The only thing Roy accomplished was getting three people killed who were only doing their jobs.  Roy does bring back the data of the lifeless worlds his father found, but that seems a poor exchange of value.

END SPOILERS

This movie was a mistake.  It is a spectacle devoid of character, emotion, and catharsis.  Instead of this one going "To the Stars" it is going "To the Dollar Bin" at Walmart.