Ad Astra: Ponderous, preposterous, but damn, Brad Pitt is giving good performances lately

By Karen Gordon

Rating: B-minus

James Gray takes us to the edge of the solar system for a story about fathers and sons in the sincere, but predictable and maddeningly cliche Ad Astra. It’s a movie that is well intentioned and aims big, but ends up being somewhat shallow.

Brad Pitt stars as Major Roy McBride, a man at the top of his game, who should be enjoying his life. But as he tells us in voice over, he is perpetually emotionally detached. And, despite wanting to, he can’t connect. His marriage to his wife Eve (Liv Tyler) has recently fallen apart. Even at work, where he’s an admired boss, McBride’s emotional dislocation makes him feel like he’s constantly playing a role, rather than living his life. 

Brad Pitt is an astronaut traversing the solar system searching for his rogue father in Ad Astra

Roy is the leader of a team building the world’s largest communication antenna, when suddenly disaster strikes and a power surge on the tower almost kills him.

When he recovers, U.S. Intelligence calls him into a meeting. The accident was just one of many surges happening all over the planet that are getting increasingly dangerous.   

They believe these blasts are coming from the planet Neptune, and even more shockingly for Roy is that they believe that the man causing the surges, possibly deliberately, is his father, a legendary astronaut H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones).  

The elder McBride went missing 16 years earlier while leading a deep space mission called the Lima Project, and has been presumed dead. 

Roy hasn’t seen his father since he was 16 years old, and even though the sense we get is that Clifford was remote and rejecting, Roy has had him on a pedestal, even following his father’s career path. 

Intelligence officials ask Roy to travel to a government facility on Mars that has the best capacity to send an audio message that could reach Neptune.  The hope is that the father, if he’s alive, will respond to a plea from his son. And then, the idea is that Roy would travel to Neptune to retrieve his father. And so off he goes. 

There are plenty of sci-fi action sequences in Ad Astra, but Gray, who co-wrote the script with Ethan Gross, has kept the tone quiet, focusing on atmosphere. This is about Roy as the archetypical wounded hero, on a quest for wholeness.

As such, Gray has given the movie has a slow, thoughtful pace, reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. With Roy’s voice-over narration, the feel is also like a number of Terrence Malick films, but perhaps most specifically Knight of Cups, which also traces a man’s inability to connect emotionally to his relationship with his damaged father.

One could also draw comparisons to Apocalypse Now, insofar as the character is pulled further and further out of his comfort zone, not quite knowing who or what he’ll meet at the end of the road, but getting hints along the way that add to a sense of existential dread.  

Like Apocalypse Now, Ad Astra is a metaphor for an emotional journey. This may be set in space, but it’s really built around a primary psychological issue: the relationship between fathers and sons, and the wound that must be faced head-on for the son to free himself from the shadow of his father and become fully his own person.  

It’s heady stuff, and Gray, who has made some terrific movies, including, most recently The Lost City of Z, knows how to balance character and action.  Ad Astra is a well-crafted movie. But, ultimately the focus on the internal search is undermined by a weak narrative. 

The entire feel of the film is focused on Roy’s internal struggle, from the muted colours and scenes in confined interior places, to the excellent ever-present score by Max Richter that has a quality of meditativeness to it even when it ramps up to underscore the more dramatic scenes.  Gray wants his film to have a stately pace, and it does.

The problem comes in many of the things from the world outside of Roy’s emotional state. 

As Roy travels through space to his various destinations, he encounters events, some of which, while again adding to a sense of dread, seem oddly dropped in. The movie has a strange relationship to space itself that sometimes seem illogical. A laser gun fight in a contained space during lift-off, for instance, seems like a ridiculous choice on the part of highly trained characters. It’s more about adding in action and again, communicating that space is dangerous, which we already know.

There are scenes where the characters seem to be able to propel themselves through space as if they were in a swimming pool.  At one point, it seems that Roy has launched himself off a planet by mysterious means, perhaps through sheer will. Again, it works as metaphor. But as a story that is meant to take place in space? Not so much.  And these various little left turns give this slow-moving film a certain listlessness.

There’s also the issue of Roy’s emotional state. He’s required to sit down with a computer program and talk to it about his feelings while wearing a device that monitors his bio functions. It’s an idea that goes very quickly from interesting to WTF since it doesn’t add much value. We already hear Roy’s feelings in voice-over.  For a movie built around a classic father/son dynamic, it’s too easy and shortchanges the emotional arc of the film.  

What compensates for that, is the performance of Brad Pitt who is very good. Pitt is in the midst of arguably his best years as an actor. He’s become an un-showy, minimalist performer who can convey real world weariness and depth.  He offers us a richer version of modern masculinity: the leader, the achiever, who does not want to be cut off from his emotional life and therefore chooses willingly to tolerate the painful process of self-examination.  

As such he brings the necessary degree of gravitas to the role and gives the film soulfulness. Tommy Lee Jones, in a very brief bit of screen time, shows us why he remains one of American cinema’s best actors. 

While it’s true that the dilemma at the center of Ad Astra stays on target, the movie itself doesn’t go as deep as its lead character. The story meanders before it gets to the point that it has been signaling through most of the film anyway.  It makes for a meditative, but listless film experience that doesn’t deliver on the depth of its heartfelt ambitions.

Ad Astra. Directed and co-written by James Gray. Starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler and Tommy Lee Jones. Opens wide, Friday, September 20.