Brad Pitt’s Ad Astra Is Literally “To the Stars”

Ad Astra, the Brad Pitt starring vehicle is a thrilling and thoughtful rumination on the finding the father trope. Written and directed by James Gray (Ethan Gross shares screenwriting credit), the film uses science fiction to tell the tale of astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) literally on sent on a mission to find his father the much beloved astronaut hero who everyone had presumed dead. The stakes are high as power surges from space keep targeting the earth and disrupting power across the world resulting in countless deaths. While this takes place in the future, Gray has endeavored to make his space opera look realistic, a smart idea that helps sells some of the films implausibilities.

Ad Astra opens with a thrilling scene where a power surge hits the space station he and several others are currently space walking while manually doing their work. The power surge leads to an explosion, the death of several astronauts, and McBride free falling back down into the atmosphere before opening his parachute and landing roughly. The following medical examination has one doctor with a bit of as you now exposition pointing out that McBride’s heart beat never rose above his normal pulse. McBride is established as the future’s Chuck Yeager and Pitt offers up a restrained performance of laconic cool.

Make no mistakes about it, this is Roy McBride’s journey and all other characters are merely sign posts along that journey. In the beginning we see Liv Tyler as Eve, his long suffering wife leaving him and watch his laconic cool take on an air of pained cruelty. Roy narrates his journey and as she is leaving him he is telling us how important focus and eschewing distractions are. Throughout the film there are short flashbacks to her, often wordless, in Roy’s wistful memories of her.

Donald Sutherland’s Colonel Thomas Pruitt is to join McBride along his journey but only sticks around long enough to let Roy know he knew his father and finally passing on evidence his father his still alive. Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga) appears along his journey only to fill in more clues as to the truth about his father and Tommy Lee Jones as Roy’s father, H. Clifford McBride appears briefly in few videos from the past, and then later only briefly to help Roy, in painful ways, along his journey. This sort of window dressing characters could be a problem if it weren’t for that fact that Roy’s journey is personal.

The material journey is one of space travel and ostensibly the search for life outside of us, but this is a metaphor for Roy’s search for and to reconnect with his absent father. Everything that he is, that has become has been because of his father’s absence and the ideal he represents in Roy’s mind. He has endeavored to be the best, to become an astronaut as a way to somehow get some kind of approval from his absent father. His father’s search for intelligent life on other planets becomes Roy’s metaphor for the search for meaning in his own life.

It’s all so simple and straight forward and thank the stars for that because there is nothing simple at all about the relationship between a father and his abandoned son. Brad Pitt has delivered maybe his best performance, much of that due to his restraint and willingness to convey an array of mixed emotions without even seemingly trying. Pitt has long managed to retain his boyish qualities but with this remarkably mature performance that boyishness, doled out in minute moments, is sublime.

It may seem that the talent that surrounds Pitt is wasted on such small roles, but these are not insignificant roles. Eve McBride is Roy’s alienated wife largely because of his abandonment issues and Liv Tyler’s greatest strength as an actress his her sullen beauty. Donald Sutherland brief performance, a third of it hidden behind a space suit and tinted helmet adds a needed gravitas needed to help us understand Roy’s issues and need to find his father. Ruth Negga matches Pitt’s restraint and gives a subtle reality check to Roy’s idealization of his father and that he hurt more than just Roy.

Gray’s decision to use space stations, ships and rockets that appear similar to the ones existing today, as well as the space suits and helmets was to give a realistic look to his space opera, but this winds up undermined at times when hurtling past planets such as Jupiter that very much look like CGI and certainly the rings of Neptune appear this way. The elder McBride’s certainty that intelligent life is out there, but then stopping at Neptune in despair for not finding it seems odd. Why would a scientist presume that the further he travels from the solar system without traveling to a distant solar system would yield any kind of life, let alone intelligent life?

None of these criticisms are an undoing of this film and the latter point only helps to accentuate that H. Clifford McBride who has obviously lost his sanity, may have not lost it because of a lengthy sojourn in space but may have been nuts all along. It doesn’t really explain why an entire space organization would go along with that, but even the immensity of that organization is really just more window dressing for Roy’s journey.