REVIEWS
58 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Reviewed by Jessica Kiang
At the end of James Gray’s last film, 2016’s The Lost
City of Z, as an explorer father and his explorer son
are being borne on their backs to an ambiguous
fate, there is the tiniest of camera tilts, up from
the burning torches on the banks of the Amazon,
into the night sky. It feels like the physical giving
way to the metaphysical, like consciousness
dissolving into space, and the atoms of their
beings being flung apart into the wide universe.
After such earthly transcendence, where
else could Gray go but through hardship to
the stars, per aspera ad astra? And so we get
Ad Astra, in which an explorer son (Brad
Pitt) goes in search of his explorer father
(Tommy Lee Jones), a pioneering hero believed
dead but actually lost to humanity in a
different way, gone mad with misanthropy
on the outer edge of our solar system.
In some ways, Ad Astra does continue Gray’s
upward trajectory. There’s the celestial grandeur
of Max Richter’s irreplaceable score – music that
somehow sounds like the motion of planets in
orbit, or the singing of stars across the lens-flared
light years of Hoyte van Hoytema’s majestic
cinematography. There are single shots in
which the sheer spectacle of sound and image
is breathtaking, such as an opening hatch
reflected in two helmet visors that resemble
a pair of eyes, their pupils dilating in wonder.
There is a consistent, voluptuous elegance to the
filmmaking here that surpasses anything Gray,
never an inelegant director, has achieved before.
But if the expansion of the setting – the story,
co-written by Gray and Ethan Gross, takes place
on Earth, the moon, Mars, Neptune and in a series
of spacecraft and stations in between – might
have been hoped to prompt an expansion of
his beautiful last film’s philosophies, there it
stumbles. The gracefulness of the craft throws
into relief the clumsiness of the dialogue, and the
silkiness of the sensorial experience sits tonally at
odds with the sometimes deranged side quests and
adventures into which this otherwise very serious-
minded film occasionally, alarmingly diverts.
It is a convincingly imagined near future
and Pitt plays Major Roy McBride, a dedicated
astronaut whose “pulse never goes above 80”,
even when plummeting through the stratosphere
after a mysterious electrical surge damages
the space antenna on which he’s working.
The source of these surges, which have the
potential to destroy the entire solar system, is
revealed by his bosses in a top-secret briefing
to be Neptune. And the brass also believe that
the Lima Project, a pioneering mission to find
extraterrestrial intelligent life that was led by his
father Clifford (Jones), is somehow responsible.
Roy swallows his scepticism that his dad
is not a dead hero but a live villain and goes
on a mission to contact him, accompanied by
Donald Sutherland’s grizzled Colonel Pruitt,
who knew McBride Sr back in the day. (Of course
he did: they were in Space Cowboys together.)
Roy travels first to the moon and then on
to Mars, from where he can send a message
by laser to Neptune. But en route ad astra, he
goes per aspera indeed: hardships that include
a Mad Max-style ambush by moon pirates, a
zero-G gunfight in a capsule against three crew
members, a bouncing canister of poison gas and
an absolutely batshit encounter with a space
baboon. These sequences are all quite brilliantly
staged but feel beamed in from a different film
than the one Gray is really invested in, which
is about the dismantling of Roy’s stolid psyche,
and about a father-son relationship blown
up to such galactic scale that its minutest
subatomic workings are the size of billboards.
And we know that is where Gray’s interest
really lies, because he tells us so, again and again,
through Roy’s frequent psych evaluations, his
encounters with underwritten supporting
characters including Ruth Negga’s Mars-base
leader and Liv Tyler’s flashback girlfriend, and
his almost completely redundant narration –
which detracts from Pitt’s superb underplaying
by spelling out what he is expressing just fine
without words. In space no one can hear you
scream, but everyone, apparently, can hear
Roy think, and for such a taciturn, closed-off
fellow, that becomes a liability, as what he is
thinking tends to be less interesting than what
we could project on to him if given room.
Ad Astra works hard to convince us that it
is narratively worthwhile to imperil all life
in the universe in order for one guy to work
through his daddy issues, but doesn’t let us
join even the closest of dots for ourselves,
making it a sometimes thrilling and always
beautiful 2.7-billion-mile odyssey in which,
somehow, there’s just not enough space.
The near future. Stoic, taciturn Major Roy McBride is an
astronaut so dedicated to his work that his relationships
suffer. But when mysterious energy surges originating
from Neptune threaten Earth, a secret is revealed to Roy:
his hero father Clifford, a pioneering astronaut in the
search for extraterrestrial life, is not dead as had been
thought, and may be the cause of the danger. As part of
the mission to contact and disarm Clifford, Roy is brought
first to the moon, which is overrun with piracy and
lawlessness due to territorial disputes over resources, and
then, via a lethal encounter with some space primates,
to an underground base on Mars. From here he sends
a message to his father, but when Clifford eventually
responds, Roy is taken off the mission. Convinced that
he must be the one to confront his possibly insane
and murderous father, Roy attempts to stow away on
the ship carrying the nuclear device designed to kill
Clifford and end the surges, but he is confronted by
the ship’s crew. In desperation, he kills them and sets
out alone for Neptune, where a final showdown with
Clifford reveals the philosophical differences between
father and son, ultimately resulting in Clifford’s
death and Roy’s return home with a new sense of the
preciousness of human connection and life on Earth.
Ad Astra
USA/People’s Republic of China 2019
Director: James Gray
Certificate 12A 122m 55s
Produced by
Brad Pitt
Dede Gardner
Jeremy Kleiner
James Gray
Anthony Katagas
Rodrigo Teixeira
Arnon Milchan
Written by
James Gray
Ethan Gross
Director of
Photography
Hoyte van Hoytema
Film Editors
John Axelrad
Lee Haugen
Production Designer
Kevin Thompson
Music
Max Richter
Production
Sound Mixer
Mark Ulano
Costume Designer
Albert Wolsky
Visual Effects
MPC
Visual Effects
and Animation
Method Studios
M r. X
Soho VFX
Visual Effects
& Animation
Created by
Weta Digital Limited
©Twentieth
Century Fox Film
Corporation, Regency
Entertainment
(USA), Inc. and
TSG Entertainment
Finance LLC (US only)
©Twentieth Century
Fox Film Corporation,
Monarchy Enterprises
S.A.R.L. and TSG
Entertainment
Finance LLC (all
other territories)
Production
Companies
A Twentieth Century
Fox and Regency
Enterprises
presentation
In association with
Bona Film Group
A New Regency, Plan
B Entertainment,
Keep Your Head
production
An RT Features,
MadRiver Pictures
production
Made in association
with TSG
Entertainment
Executive Producers
Marc Butan
Lourenço Sant’Anna
Sophie Mas
Yu Dong
Jeffrey Chan
Anthony Mosawi
Paul Conway
Yariv Milchan
Michael Schaefer
Cast
Brad Pitt
Roy McBride
Tommy Lee Jones
H. Clifford McBride
Ruth Negga
Helen Lantos
John Ortiz
Lieutenant
General Rivas
Liv Tyler
Eve
Donald Sutherland
Thomas Pruitt
Greg Bryk
Chip Garnes
Loren Dean
Donald Stanford
Kimberly Elise
Lorraine Deavers
John Finn
Brigadier General
Stroud
LisaGay Hamilton
Adjutant General
Vogel
Donnie Keshawarz
Captain Lawrence
Tanner
Bobby Nish
Franklin Yoshida
Dolby Atmos
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
20th Century Fox
International (UK)
Flight club: Brad Pitt
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 1
