Ad Astra is a Brad Pitt movie, through and through.
For many, like me, that’s enough of a selling point to guarantee that my butt will be in a seat in the theater come opening weekend. After all, my two all-time favorite movies, without question, are Se7en and Fight Club.
For total transparency, I should probably add that those aren’t just my favorite movies because of Pitt, but because of the films themselves. One is the greatest serial killer thriller ever lensed, and Fight Club, well, that spoke to my soul in a way that shook me to my core.
Also, it’s probably fair to note that I don’t love every movie that Pitt stars in, only the ones where he gets up to his elbows in grime and sheds his movie star looks to fully immerse in character. I’m talking films like Snatch, Inglorious Basterds, Kalifornia and Twelve Monkeys.
This is not that kind of movie.
Still, Ad Astra is all about Pitt’s performance, and boy howdy, does he create a startlingly raw character in Roy McBride, a U.S. astronaut who is never, ever rattled, even when he’s plummeting through the atmosphere after an explosion rocks the international space station where he’s working when the film opens.
McBride is a lonely, haunted man who only finds solace in the emptiness of space.
He barely shows any emotion, whether speaking in a flat, almost lifeless voice during his daily psychological debriefings or learning during a top-secret meeting that his father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a fellow astronaut, whose manned mission to the edge of the known galaxy ended in tragedy more than a decade earlier, might be alive somewhere near Pluto and trying to destroy Earth by sending bursts of dark matter toward our planet.
Papa McBride had been dispatched to the stars to finally find evidence of intelligent life in the galaxy. But then, something bad happened. That something is teased as being a big clue for later.
Of more urgent matters, to thwart the destruction of Earth, the government comes up with a crazy scheme to send Roy to Mars (which has been colonized) via a trip to the moon (also colonized, and with retail shopping and an Applebee’s, no less) in order to transmit a plea from son to dad to stop the madness.
Along the way, viewers are treated to a lunar dune buggy gunfight (apparently, there are pirates on the moon now), an unplanned rescue mission that reveals killer mammals in space and a sprint through subterranean tunnels beneath the surface of Mars so Roy can sneak aboard a rocket heading for Pluto.
If you’ve ever heard David Bowie’s Space Oddity or even Peter Schilling’s Major Tom, then you know nothing good can come from a desperate, haunted man alone in space hurtling to a vast unknown, especially when that trip is to reconnect with an overbearing parent who never displayed the faintest evidence of paternal love or pride.
Ad Astra is a deep movie, that way.
Amid all the necessary action set pieces, director/co-writer James Gray reveals his true agenda, which is to explore the similarities between human emotion and frailty against the cold, unforgiving void of galactic nothingness.
Gray, however, is no Stanley Kubrick. Hell, he’s no Michael Bay either. And Ad Astra, as a result, finds itself weightless and drifting between the intellectual heft of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the popcorn cheese of Armageddon.
There’s a genuine, staggering beauty to much of Ad Astra, especially when the films takes a minute to allow strange, alien landscapes to tickle our imagination. I’ve never seen such a fully realized vision of the moon or Mars or even Pluto before.
And Pitt makes for a compelling companion into the outer limits, especially once McBride allows his emotions to thaw.
But Ad Astra is missing some critical component, some jaw-dropping reveal, some reason for existing.
For all its build-up, for all of its ominous apocalyptic hoo-ha, Ad Astra has very little to say once it reaches its big climactic showdown between son McBride and papa McBride, which really isn’t a showdown or very climatic.
What it does say — about intelligent life beyond Earth, about parents, about children, about compartmentalizing all emotion in order to be a dutiful soldier — doesn’t land with the wallop that I’m sure the bean counters at Twentieth Century Fox had hoped.
Despite an award-worthy performance from Pitt, Ad Astra never really takes off, at least not in the way you might expect after watching its very deceptive marketing campaign.
And, as they say in Houston, that’s a problem.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Best of the Bay 2019.