‘But beneath their sublime surfaces… there was nothing…’
You know when films are going to be good but boring, don’t you. The Post, Lincoln, Vice. That kind of film. Very important. Very serious. Sometimes a bit dull. You don’t necessarily expect this from science fiction, but there is a certain kind of sci-fi movie that fits the bill. The ones that pose big philosophical questions and feature a lot of staring off into the middle distance. Ad Astra is 100% one of those films.
Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) has dedicated his life space exploration. This has come at the expense of his relationship with his partner (a barely glimpsed Liv Tyler) and prominently features echoes of McBride’s father – also an astronaut, – missing-presumed-dead after undertaking his own doomed mission into the depths of space.
Pitt’s musings on his own mortality and the nature of life on earth are delivered in such a po-faced monotone that what is undoubtedly a prescient message is lost in the ether. While this is central to the character of Roy McBride, it makes for an emotionally closed off protagonist, so much so that even when the howls of anguish come later, they barely register. This is the second supposedly great Pitt movie to come out in 2019 that left me cold. Some hot streak.
Ad Astra is a film that drowns under the weight of its own self-importance and one that left me longing for 2001: A Space Odyssey – the film that rendered pretty much all films in this genre redundant way back in 1969. There are glimpses of a great movie here but they are all too brief. A missed opportunity.