Director James Gray has already shown that he can create beautiful art from man's - and more specifically man's - stubborn exploration trips. In reality-based Lost City of Z (2016), Charlie Hunnam was looking for a hidden city in the Amazon jungles in the 1920s. An impressive adventure with dark undertones. Ad Astra touches on similar themes but is faster, better looking and optimized for scams.
The film takes place in a near future where man searches for the stars to solve the earth's problems. Astronaut Roy McBride, played by Brad Pitt, is called in for a secret mission when a series of electrical storms hit the planet. The deadly storm is linked to Roy's dad Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legendary astronaut who has been missing since Roy's teens after a mission to Neptune. Clifford shows up in vaguely unpleasant video messages that testify that something on the expedition went very wrong.
Roy has to leave Little Tellus and travel to Mars to try to contact his father, which also means confronting his greatest trauma of having been left, something that made him never have children himself.
It will be a journey with many obstacles that James Gray turns into spectacular action sequences. A free fall through the atmosphere, a car chase away from pirates on the Moon, a bloodthirsty baboon inside a distressed spaceship.
It sounds exaggerated but is both breathtaking and realistic. Gray uses the varying degree of gravity to build sophisticated but grounded death traps.
Ad Astra is not exclusively space action. Sometimes it may seem that close-ups of Brad Pitt's overwintered feuds make up 50% of playing time. But that's a good thing. Pitt subtly and masterfully embodies the stubborn, but basically wounded, astronaut who fights not to inherit his father's sins.
James Gray explores infinity both visually and philosophically. Is space man's only chance to learn from his mistakes? Or just another vain exploration, a false substitute for self-knowledge that men have engaged in at all times? Although Roy loves space, he seems to hate how people colonize it.
Roy is fighting for his heritage and nature all alone. He goes through "psychological evaluations" between all the stressful challenges, where a robotic voice (which gives references to HAL9000 from Kubrick's 2001 - a space adventure) asks how he is feeling. Roy talks openly and intelligently about his emotional life. He does not feel well, is broken by anger and sadness, but because he has learned to control his heartbeat, he gets no comfort, only permission to continue the mission. The technology is rarely good or bad, just totally indifferent - an extension of the people and their way of exploiting Roy for their own purposes.
After all, power fireworks are the most hit scene when Roy is on Mars and a touch screen gives a friendly but definite no when he needs it the most.
There are problems that break the illusion and prevent the film from being perfect. Why is Brad Pitt wearing Yeezys? Really needed the Twitter-releasing scene where an asshole in a barista knot is excessively sexist? And hadn't Roy's wife (Liv Tyler) been able to add more, instead of being the typical "waiting wife"?
It's also easy to be overwhelmed by the end of the cosmic father-and-son therapy that ties everything together. Anyone who expects the same complexity as in Tarkovsky's Solaris should turn down their expectations a snap.
Still, there are petitesses who should not stop anyone from seeing Ad Astra on the big screen. It swallows you up and causes you to lose your breath in a way that could possibly not work on a laptop.