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James Gray's Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt as Roy McBride, manages to pull off the trick most science fiction movies aim for, at least should aim for. It tackles big themes of redemption, loss, escape, love, being true to one's self, and the psychological stress of solitude while, at the same time, having some pretty cool images of rockets blasting off into space and astronauts fighting and shooting each other while spinning round in zero gravity.
The basic gist of the film is that McBride, a taciturn, yet focused, space station worker in the near future (it's always the near future these days as the apocalypse starts to feel within touching distance) is sent on a mission to Neptune (via the moon and Mars) to terminate the failed 'Lima Project'. A project in which his celebrated father H Clifford McBride is believed to have died working on.
The elder McBride is so esteemed as an astronaut that his picture hangs next to those of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins and we also hear how he was the first man to reach both Jupiter and Saturn. But his last work, the 'Lima project', not only caused him to disappear and orphaned his son but is now believed to be creating deadly 'surges' that could threaten all life on Earth and destroy the entire solar system!
Big stakes! But Ad Astra succeeds by remembering to marry a story of potential global annihilation with the personal, mostly delivered through a series of interior monologues in Roy McBride's mind and psychological evaluations delivered to faceless and uncaring AI bots. The near future world of Ad Astra is, like most near futures we see on screen now, a slightly depressing one and one that lacks warmth, humanity, or connection.
There are people who were born, and have lived most of their lives, in an underground bunker on Mars (Ruth Negga's Helen Lantos talks positively of her one and only visit to the beautiful blue planet of Earth), and humans, having used all of Earth's resources, have, somewhat predictably, taken to fighting over what's left on the surface of the moon.
Which makes for a pretty good lunar rover car chase/shoot out, one worthy of a space western, as much as it does a comment on the seemingly unending human capacity for greed and mutually assured self-destruction. The moon, McBride laments, has not lived up to its potential and has disappointingly become just another outpost of Earth. The capitalist consumerist imperatives of our planet are obvious the moment tourists land there.
It's been colonised, basically, and not just by armies (it's noticeable that NASA is never referred to in the film, Roy McBride works for the US Air Force Space Division) but by big business. The moon airport/space port has concession stands, opportunities for visiting kids to have their photo taken with people dressed up as aliens, and chain restaurants. I spotted a branch of Applebee's. A company that seems to be having its triple chocolate meltdown cake and eating it by having a piece of product placement in a film that hints very strongly at its disapproval of corporate domination. How post-modern.
The moon airport looks pretty much like any other airport and, notwithstanding just how impressive the special fx are in sci-fi films these day - something I always forget because I don't go to see that many, Ad Astra, visually at least, is not dissimilar to many other films of its genre. I spotted nods to Star Wars, Gravity, Alien, and 2001:A Space Odyssey.
There's even a scene which seems to be a riff on Titanic but the overwhelming influence, and director Gray has been very open about this, is Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. That book was also the blueprint for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now was, of course, set in Vietnam and Heart of Darkness in the Congo but the story of a man venturing into potential oblivion unsure of what he'll find, what dangers he will face, and what demons his own mind may unleash upon him has proved to have great potential and moving it from Africa to Asia to, er, Neptune hasn't affected its power.
Brad Pitt gives a solid, unshowy, performance (as befits his character) as Roy McBride yet still manages to dominate the screen. The likes of Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones (seen in flashbacks and video messages to his son), Kimberley Elise, and John Ortiz cope admirably with their limited screen time while Liv Tyler (as Eve, McBride's presumably estranged former partner) is so underused as to barely warrant inclusion in the film. Perhaps she's just there to remind us that Roy McBride, and indeed Brad Pitt, despite spending lengthy periods of time alone, is resolutely heterosexual.
Donald Sutherland crops up as veteran astronaut Loren Dean, a former friend of McBride Snr and while it doesn't seem a push to imagine in the near future that octogenarians will be holding down high ranking positions in the USAF Space Division, it does seem unlikely that they'd still be zooming around in space.
It adds to the strangeness of the often vertigo inducing Ad Astra. For the most part the narrative is easy enough to follow, though the random ferocious baboons that show up after McBride's ship is diverted to help a Norwegian craft in trouble seem to be a complete, and slightly disturbing, outlier to the thrust of the story.
There are hints that this is some kind of Greek odyssey (the ship's name is Cepheus - the father of Princess Andromeda in the Perseus legend as well as the name of one of the Argonauts - and there's something almost Oedipal in McBride's feelings for his father though fortunately, considering its 12A certification, the mum stuff's kept out) and the title is taken from the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid. Ad Astra meaning 'to the stars' in Latin.
These could be seem as toweringly pretentious affectations on behalf of director Gray and his team but, in truth, despite its interstellar setting, Ad Astra tells, pretty well for most of its duration, a classic story. One of one man and his quest to find the truth. Something the best of us are all, surely, searching for. Hopefully we won't need to spend over three months confined to a tin can floating through the darkness of space to the farthest reaches of our solar system to find out. They really would discover rings around your Uranus if that was to happen.
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