Movie review: AdAstra is filled with exciting cliffhangers, and a few supporting actors register. But it’s mostly Brad Pitt and nothing but
Roy is a great role for Brad Pitt, who narrates throughout in a measured, groggy voice reminiscent of Martin Sheen’s Apocalypse Now character. Photo: Francois Duhamel/Twentieth Century Fox James Gray’s space opera Ad Astra is so eerily, transfixingly beautiful that I want to purge from my mind its resolution, which reduces what precedes it to a Shaggy Dad story — an especially earthbound one.
Roy is a great role for Pitt, who narrates throughout in a measured, groggy voice reminiscent of Martin Sheen’s Willard and whose lack of modulation can thereby pass for existential woe. Roy is required to take a daily “psych eval,” through which we learn that he has pushed his emotions so deep that nothing ever gets to him. His pulse remains at 80, even when in free fall miles above the planet. “I’ve been trained to compartmentalize,” he tells us, blandly, but it’s more than that, of course.
The movie is filled with exciting cliffhangers and a few supporting actors register — chiefly Ruth Negga, Loren Dean, and a sepulchral Donald Sutherland. But it’s mostly Pitt and nothing but. Gray, even more successfully than in Two Lovers and The Lost City of Z, steeps you in his protagonist’s psyche. It’s as if we’re in some sort of hyperbaric chamber, with oxygen meted out gradually to keep us absorbed even when our fight-or-flight instincts tell us to panic — our pulses remain at 80.
That’s the point of all this: Space is a drag, and going in search of extraterrestrial life requires denying or desensitizing oneself to terrestrial life, to the natural, the human. Only when out of his own world does Roy understand how selfishly he has lived and how much he needs to reconnect with his father to understand himself — at which point his pulse, doncha know, shoots up.
I could hardly agree more with the humanist message of Ad Astra, while at the same time my inner Trekkie is saying, “We came millions of miles for this?” When we meet McBride Sr. it’s an anticlimax, even with Jones so eloquently haggard, like an elderly, shrunken lion. He’s primed to give a performance but McBride’s madness — unlike Kurtz’s — gives him no stature. In the end, Roy could probably have clicked his heels together at any time and gone back to Kansas.
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