The New Yorker - USA (2019-09-23)

72 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019

In James Gray’s new movie, Brad Pitt plays an astronaut on a secret mission.

THE CURRENT CINEMA

NO MAN’S LAND

“Ad Astra” and “Monos.”

BY ANTHONY LANE

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD A. CHANCE

A

car chase on the moon. Now, that’s
something I haven’t seen before.
Warmest congratulations to “Ad Astra,”
therefore, for presenting a fresh spec­
tacle to tired eyes. The cars in question
are skeletal buggies, upgraded from the
lunar rovers that the folks on the last
three Apollo missions drove around,
just for the hell of it. (And for the sci­

ence of it, too. Honestly.) But the chase
is a chase. We join a small convoy of
rovers, one of them bearing an impor­
tant passenger, Major Roy McBride
(Brad Pitt). Merrily they roll along,
across a bone­white prairie of nothing
much. Suddenly, other buggies veer into
view, intent on pillage and theft. Space
pirates! Bring ’em on! There is a crash,
an exchange of fire, and the alarming
sight of McBride’s rover slewing over
the lip of a crater. And the best thing
about the scene? It’s practically noise­
less. We might as well be watching a
silent movie. One spaceman shooting
another, it turns out, makes the same
sound that your vacuum cleaner makes
when it tries to swallow the rug.
“Ad Astra” is directed by James Gray.

So tight was his staging of a car chase,

through torrents of blinding rain, in “We

Own the Night” (2007) that the only

way to top it, I suspect, was to go off­

planet. From “Little Odessa” (1994) to

“The Lost City of Z” (2016), Gray has

been brewing his particular blend of

action and introspection. His characters

tend to lose themselves in physical

conflict or tests of endurance, only to

draw back and lose themselves in

themselves. McBride, in the latest film,

is a case in point. In a breathless early

sequence, he is seen toiling on the out­

side of the International Space Antenna,

which resembles a giant stick insect sus­

pended in the upper atmosphere; with­

out warning, he is knocked off by a power

surge and tumbles in free fall toward terra

firma. Elsewhere, though, he shows an

aptitude for sitting still, staring shyly

downward, and murmuring, “I will not

rely on anyone or anything.” Brad Pitt

fans, high on the bonhomie that he ra­

diates in “Once Upon a Time... in Holly­

wood,” may well be flummoxed by this

dual approach, and tempted to ask, What

are you, dude, a rocket jock or a recluse?

“Ad Astra” is set in the near future.

Technology has leaped ahead, closely

followed by salesmanship. You can, for

instance, fly Virgin to the moon. The

attendants charge you a hundred and

twenty­five dollars for a pillow­and­blan­

ket pack and offer a hot towel before

you land. Nice. There’s an outpost of

DHL in the arrivals lounge, plus, one

presumes, a bunch of angry passengers,

demanding to know why their baggage

has been sent to Pluto. McBride goes

along for the ride, though he’s using

the moon purely as an interplanetary

trampoline, from which he can bounce

onward to Mars, and from Mars to the

suburbs of Neptune.

His mission is not merely secret but

personal. The surge that blew him off

the antenna was caused by an energy

pulse—one of many being squirted

through the void, to the detriment of

mankind, from somewhere in Neptune’s

rings. To be precise: from the last known

location of the Lima Project, an enter­

prise so steeped in mystery that nobody

can say whether it was named for the

city or the bean. The commander of

the project was none other than Clifford

McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), Roy’s

father, who hasn’t been heard from in

almost thirty years. “Your father may

be hiding from us,” Roy is told. If there’s

anything more cosmically grumpy than

Tommy Lee Jones lost in space, scien­

tists have yet to discover it, and Clifford

must be handled with care. The plan is

for Roy to nip to Mars and, once there,

to read out a typewritten message to his

dad from the bigwigs back on Earth.

Really? Is that it? Of the many remark­

able things about “Ad Astra,” the most

remarkable of all is that the task of the

noble hero could basically have been

completed by fax.

This fusion of the domestic and the

galactic keeps nagging away at creators

of science fiction. In “Contact” (1997),

Jodie Foster’s character gets whooshed

to a far­flung solar system, where she

finds her late father standing on a beach

and assuring her that all is well. Then,

we have the gangly monsters in “Arrival”

(2016), which somehow enable the lin­

guist, played by Amy Adams, to reach

out to her daughter, who is yet to be

born. And let’s not even mention Darth

Vader. It is only natural, I suppose, that

visions of the extraterrestrial should