Review: Ad Astra (2019)

James Gray’s Ad Astra is a small story told on a big canvas. This is not a bad thing. Like many science-fiction dramas, it has the structure of a short story, featuring a compact narrative, modest concept, and a focused emotional arc. The added bonus of the film being science fiction is that this story is told against the massive backdrop of space exploration and the unknown of the cosmos. So, even though its thematic interests are more limited in scope than many science-fiction spectacles, it at least gets to indulge in marvellous worldbuilding and take us on a fantastic voyage along the way of exploring the emotional life of its protagonist. 

Both on the surface and at its core, Ad Astra is a story of a father and a son. The father is H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), the most celebrated astronaut in history and the commander of the Lima Project, a deep space mission sent to Neptune decades before the beginning of the film. The son is Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut tasked with making contact with his father and stopping a series of deep space pulses that appear to be connected to Clifford’s disappearance and are wreaking havoc on earth through power surges and blackouts. 

We follow Roy as he heads first to the Moon, then Mars, and then into deep space in search of his father. We hear his thoughts in voiceover and see fragments of his former life in flashback, particularly his growing distance, literally and emotionally, from his wife, Eve (Liv Tyler). Although the scale of Ad Astra is considerable, the film remains focused on the familial relationship at its core. Even as Clifford remains off screen, Roy spends time watching old videologs of him and ruminating on his absence in voiceover. He frets about how this distant father has cast a shadow on his entire life and even confesses that he sees his own anger as a reflection of his father’s.

In many ways, Roy is the neglected son who hates his father, but nevertheless becomes him, and Gray does little to challenge or subvert this archetypal father-son relationship. In fact, he leans into the Freudian themes at the film’s centre, using the narrative to position Clifford as a giant or God that Roy needs to slay in order to become his own man. However, at the same time Gray is too generous a filmmaker to allow a negative relationship to remain beyond redemption. As he does in The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z, he allows for growth, at least on the part of the protagonist, which means that the sins of the father are not inevitably the sins of the son.

This generous approach to its characters makes Ad Astra an almost therapeutic enterprise, continuing a recent trend in science-fiction or space-related films (whether Gravity or First Man) that use space flight and exploration as a metaphor for escaping trauma. It means that even during the most spectacular moments of the film, when the enormity of space is beckoning us to consider the fantastic, Gray turns our focus back inward on the emotional reasons for venturing into the void. For Roy and especially for Clifford, the motivation is similar to Percy Fawcett’s quest into the Amazon in The Lost City of Z: it’s an attempt to achieve transcendence, to touch the sublime. But even more than in The Lost City of Z, in Ad Astra Gray allows his skepticism of transcendence to show through, especially in the film’s later moments. He can’t help but ask whether such transcendence is worth the cost of forgoing human relationship.

This is a fruitful thematic investigation, even if I personally bristle at the reduction of the cosmos on display to therapeutic aid. There is a wonder to space travel that the film ignores or at least overwhelms with its focus on the sacrifices it requires of those pursuing it. As well, the enormity of the cosmos and the quest for transcendence—the quest to see the face of God in the eternity of the universe—can be worth the cost of emotional comforts. To think otherwise reduces reality to pure emotion, pure experience—it shrinks our capacity for imagination. But I fully admit this is a philosophical disagreement I have with Gray’s approach, and less an indictment of the film.

And Ad Astra does have some marvellous science-fiction filmmaking that fuels its near-future world. Like all hard science-fiction films of the past 50 years, Ad Astra exists in the shadow of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and several moments cannot help but reference or work in relation to that film, whether the depiction of a commercial space flight to the Moon or an encounter with a drifting object in the far reaches of the Solar System. But like many of the films of the 1970s and 1980s that drew inspiration from 2001, including Silent Running, Outland, or even 2001’s sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Ad Astra learns the right lessons from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece and creates a compelling science-fiction world through its production design and attention to minute details rather than exposition.

An early wide shot showing Roy doing maintenance work on a space antenna, a structure tethered to the earth but stretching into the upper atmosphere and space, introduces us to the ways that this world has advanced beyond the technological limitations of our own, even if people’s lives seem to be much the same as they are now. Later scenes on the Moon show how corporations still infect the futuristic advancements of the human species, with an Applebee’s sign adorning an outer wall of the lunar city and cheap costumed figures like at an amusement park greeting children who arrive via shuttle. Roy even comments on this through narration, voicing his own frustrations with the reduction of the sublime, albeit through a comment on how his father would hate what’s happened to the Moon. For Roy can only express himself in relation to his father; his emotional understanding of the world is tethered to Clifford’s, and only by severing that tether can he properly heal.

The film’s best sequence takes place on Mars as it depicts an underground colony run by the pragmatic, Mars-born Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga). The soft, red lighting and utilitarian structure of the underground colony allows Gray to detach from the more literal science-fiction designs of the Earth and Moon scenes and start to indulge his artistic imagination. Scenes in “comfort rooms,” which are spare, windowless rooms that resemble cells in psychiatric hospitals, albeit with gentle images of nature projected on their surfaces, let Gray play with abstract lighting and layers of imagery within the frame. The abstract approach aids the transition to the deep space scenes where Gray can play fast and loose with physics in order to externalize Roy’s inner torment, bringing it out into the visual spectrum of the film.

So as is amply demonstrated in the filmmaking itself, Ad Astra is a marvellous production, even if its thematic preoccupations are too reductive for my own tastes in science fiction. For those viewers with a more contentious relationship to their fathers than my own, or a more terrestrial view of the universe, it may prove to be a more moving experience in addition to being a rigorous display of science-fiction worldbuilding.

8 out of 10

Ad Astra (2019, USA)

Directed by James Gray; written by James Gray and Ethan Gross; starring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland, John Ortiz, Greg Bryk, Loren Dean, Natasha Lyonne.