I’m on something of a Brad Pitt kick this summer, what with my repeated viewings of the fantastic Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. And I do love me some spaceman sci-fi. So of course I was first in line to see Brad’s meditative starboy journey in Ad Astra.
Like a fourth-place finisher at the Olympics, Ad Astra is unquestionably decent and probably performing the best it can ever hope–but taken in context, it’s overshadowed by other performers who do it better.
Directed (and co-written) by James Gray (Lost City of Z, unimpressive), Ad Astra unfurls slowly, following Brad’s isolated and deliberately cool-headed Maj. Roy McBride from a space antenna down to Earth, then to the Moon, then to Mars, and ultimately far beyond, in search of his long-lost father (Tommy Lee Jones). McBride is a highly competent astronaut, but hardly a hero–more a quiet husk of a man who questions everything, softly.
Pitt’s performance is at times remarkable and always subtle, though it’s never really enough to jolt Ad Astra to life–and the supporting cast, while adequate, don’t resuscitate it either.
I blame the story. The main plot is strangely undeveloped and legitimately hard to follow. A handful of action sequences crop up, but they’re afterthoughts–forced, dreamlike, and out of place, lacking either realism or much relevance to the story. And these blips aside, too much time is spent in moody ploddings between bleak set-pieces in search of… what, exactly? A meditation on abandonment? On the stark and unending loneliness of being irrelevant to our fathers, be they real or celestial? If we’re all alone in the universe, can’t we just cry for a while and then watch Interstellar again?
Ad Astra isn’t a bad film. It’s quite an enjoyable meander, a slow burn, and it’s certainly visually striking. (I really did love its glum cynicism–we glimpse “Subway,” “DHL” and “Hudson News” signs in the moon-port.) It always felt, though, like a shadow of other films: Solaris, Total Recall, Interstellar, Sunshine, Gravity, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the list goes on. One way Ad Astra might have burned a little cigarette hole in my brain is to show a unique and memorable snapshot of future earth–hello, Minority Report–but it doesn’t do that either. Spit-shine a Nissan Leaf, drone-film a mountain road, and set a couple scenes inside a BoConcept store and you, apparently, have the future. This Haus demands more.
Haus Verdict: A decent and meditative, if low-energy, spacewalk through what ends up being a surprisingly opaque and lonely story. Pitt is great, and it’s visually very pretty. But it’s not nearly as profound as it wants to be, or should have been.
Ad Astra is playing now; it opened this past Friday, September 20.
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