Ad Astra
The cost of greatness is often overlooked by those who admire it. There’s a rocky history to just about every legend, full of heartbreak, tribulations, and sacrifice that are often sidelined by accomplishment, creating an untouchable mythology that makes these people superhuman. Ad Astra is a film about tearing down these legends and unearthing the humanity that is often lost in the pursuit of greatness.
Taking the ever filmable premise of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ad Astra is about astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), who is tasked with going to Mars to send a message to his father, famed astronaut Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones). Clifford has been away on a secret mission to find alien life for the last 20 or so years, and after a recent wave of power surges sweeps through Earth and its colonies, the government believes that Clifford and his team could have something to do with it.
This seemingly epic quest is handled with the casualness of modern-day travel, complete with commercial flights to the moon and government-run facilities in space that feels more like celestial DMV’s than intergalactic space stations. The entire world of Ad Astra feels grounded in reality, becoming less of an imaginative projection of the future and more of a realistic prediction of it. It’s this presentation that reminds you that while the film is a space movie, it isn’t a movie about space.
Everywhere he goes, Roy is constantly reminded of his father’s greatness. He is not Roy McBride, astronaut. He is Roy McBride, son of Clifford McBride. It’d be a harsh label regardless, but it’s made even worse when we see we see the lengths he’s gone just to have a chance at following in his father's footsteps. His devotion to his work has left him little time for a personal life, time that is cut even shorter as his wife (Liv Tyler) has walked out on him. As we follow Roy on his quest, we see this behavior is learned, as his father was too busy cementing his legacy to be a presence in his life. This acts as the thematic throughline that inspires every event and reveal in the film, ignoring the “real” in the quest for discovering higher meaning.
Ad Astra is not the non-stop thrill ride of space travel that the marketing may lead you to believe. It’s a slower film that takes its time, using the backdrop of space to emphasize the underlying emptiness of existence and the fruitless pursuit of meaning. It asks tough questions with even tougher answers. So if you’re looking for a two hour escape from the day-to-day wrestling with these thoughts, stray away. But if you’re looking to revel in the existential dread, or just want to see Pitt kill it for the second time this year, Ad Astra is worth your (limited) time.