To the Stars
Filmmaker James Gray, last on the scene with the acclaimed historical exploration drama The Lost City of Z—which gave us Charlie Hunnam’s slow disconnect from his family as he continuously searches for a lost civilization in the Amazon—returns with a story of a man rediscovering his humanity as he gets farther away from home.
Ad Astra has been advertised as a thrilling science fiction epic in the mold of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. It is thrilling, and it is epic, but its scope is much narrower, focusing on a man in search of an absent father at the center of a life-threatening mystery. Gray has crafted a meld between Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey that follows Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride as he’s tasked with going to the outer reaches of the galaxy to uncover the source of electrical storms that may involve his presumed dead father (Tommy Lee Jones).
Pitt plays Roy as a man deeply compartmentalized, able to remain calm in the most harrowing situations; he’s so tightly wound that even free-falling to Earth from sub-orbit is a seemingly mundane problem. Like Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now, Roy narrates his inner thoughts, externalizing the numbness that could be mistaken for disengagement. It’s only as Roy is given his mission and takes one harrowing step after another toward his father’s supposed location that he reconnects with his own emotions.
Pitt can be misjudged as a bland presence on screen when not purposefully oozing charisma or goofball charm as he’s done for Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. He’s phenomenal in Ad Astra, displaying a kind of internal life he previously showcased in Moneyball, but without Billy Bean’s inherent swagger. Like Sheen in Apocalypse, he’s so good here because of what he doesn’t do or say in reaction to the insanity around him; he anchors what could have been an incredibly cold story, and makes its themes of needing to be present with one’s loved ones deeply felt.
Ad Astra is a bit like last year’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man in that its strong emotional core isn’t really implemented until near the film’s conclusion. Instead, Gray paints a near-future of intriguing familiarity while moving from one tense set-piece to another, all the while never losing focus of the intensely human story he’s telling.