Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Director: James Gray
Quick Impressions:
I would have called this movie, In Space, Monkeys Go Crazy. This is probably why I was not hired as a creative consultant. Ad Astra is a much more eloquent title. (It’s also the first half of the state motto of Kansas and brings back fond memories of my high school Latin class.) Still, my main takeaways from the film are a snarling baboon and Tommy Lee Jones staring unnervingly into the camera. As I watched, I kept thinking of my alternate title in an eerie, elongated whisper. “In space, monkeys go craaay-zeeee.” (In honor of Brad Pitt, I also briefly considered The Thirteenth Monkey.)
This is a rewarding film with excellent visuals and a haunting score. Just now, when Googling around to find out if Ad Astra is based on a novel (and it’s not), I saw director James Gray describe the film as a mash-up of Apocalypse Now and 2001, and I thought, “Well, you nailed that.”
If you go to this movie and don’t get a Conrad/Kubrickian vibe, then I’m going to assume you fell asleep.
All the Oscar baity movies coming up this year look so flashy and seductive. I have a hard time believing this quiet, measured film will win too many awards. (But it’s quite well made, so you never know. I’ve been wrong before.) Pitt’s lead performance is certainly very strong. Watching this not long after seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood definitely drives home the actor’s versatility. I think his excellent leading work in this film makes Pitt all the more likely to win Best Supporting Actor for his equally excellent (and entirely different) turn in Tarantino’s far flashier movie.
For me personally, though, the best performance of the movie is given by Tommy Lee Jones. He’s in the film so briefly, but gosh he’s wonderful. In his limited screentime, he managed to give me such a sense of his character. (Actually, I find his the more interesting character and wish the story were about him instead.) This may be one of my favorite performances of his, up there with Hope Springs. In both movies, he’s playing someone so different from his typical movie persona. I mean, obviously his Oscar winning turn in The Fugitive is career defining and crowd pleasing and fun to watch, but I always like it when he departs from his usual screen persona to play something a little more out there.
The Good:
Visually this film is so evocative of 2001, and that cool, chilly Kubrickian vibe is clearly what director James Gray is going for. Obviously sci-fi as a film genre is pretty indebted to 2001 in general, and it’s not surprising that a movie with so many scenes on the moon would bring Kubrick’s classic to mind. But it isn’t just the craters on the moon. It’s the orange recliners. It’s the way certain shots are framed. One of the first things my husband said to me after the movie was how much certain aspects of it reminded him of 2001, and I heartily agreed. (And if you’re reaching for the stars with your sci-fi Oscar hopeful, surely that’s the film you want to emulate.)
My family spent just about every weekend this summer watching classic space films, and this one fits right in with old school Sci-Fi classics like 2001 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (And it’s not completely unlike The Forbidden Planet.)
Brad Pitt’s performance is fascinating if you’re a fan of his overall work. He plays the strong, silent, controlled type. (In fact, it’s easy to imagine Ryan Gosling in this role.) What amazes me most is that in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt also plays a strong, largely silent, (sometimes less) controlled type. But these two characters are nothing at all alike, and Pitt is able to convey their differences to us so clearly without much dialogue. You would never mistake Roy McBride for Cliff Booth. As you watch one, you never once think of the other. (Unless you’re obsessed with the Oscars like I am and impressed by Pitt’s versatility.) People might use similar words to describe these two characters, but as Pitt plays them, they seem nothing alike at all. (Side note, I was also so impressed with the way Pitt’s face sometimes twitched just below his eye. I thought, “How is he doing that?” Then I realized it’s probably just what his face does when he feels certain emotions. Surely he’s not thinking, “Now I’ll make the skin perilously near to my eye twitch.”)
The other performances in the film are also good. I’ve already mentioned Tommy Lee Jones, and there’s not much more I can say about his performance without giving spoilers. But he has one scene that simply thrilled me.
Donald Sutherland also manages to chomp scenery with great subtlety. He’s an understated scene stealer. You wouldn’t think that would be possible, but his character is always so fun to watch and to try to figure out. If he weren’t there, we would never be sure that something was wrong.
Liv Tyler is just there to corner the market on women men think of on dangerous space missions involving fathers. It’s such a small (though admittedly pivotal) character. The character is there to give the protagonist a point of human attachment back on Earth. The actress is clearly there so people will be like, “Wow! This movie is so much better than Armageddon!”
Natasha Lyonne is also highly recognizable and colorful in a really small part.
Ruth Negga gives a good performance, though I did find some of her character’s actions less plausible than other elements of the film. I wish we got to see more of the supporting cast on the trip to Mars. I liked all of those characters (especially those played by Donnie Keshawarz and LisaGay Hamilton). I wanted to spend a bit longer with them.
I loved Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography. I didn’t realize he was the cinematographer until the end credits, but I also liked his work on Interstellar. He clearly knows how to make space movies look cool. As I’ve mentioned, many shots are evocative of 2001, but the movie also has some distinctive visual moments that stand out and stick with you.
I also liked Max Richter’s creepy, cool score. The movie would not work as well without the music. Oddly, for a film so eventful, so much of this movie is measured scenes of ponderous silence. These would be overwhelming without the music. (The end credits also had an “additional music by,” which made me laugh at the time and joke to my husband, “Oh, yeah. We really had even less dialogue than I thought. We are going to need some additional music.”)
Best Scene Visually:
I love those trippy underground corridors on Mars. My favorite shot in the film is Ruth Negga staring forward, then turning back. I love that the camera lingers on her for such a long time.
As I write this, I now realize that some of the shots of Neptune also look amazing and probably weren’t easy to create since, obviously, they didn’t strap a go-pro on Brad Pitt and send him to Neptune for real. (I always forget about this kind of thing. Not until after I saw Gravity did it click into place for me that the movie wasn’t really filmed in space. I forget about these kinds of challenges and believe the illusion. Surely Ad Astra will win a bunch of technical awards. The special effects are flawless.)
Best Action Sequence:
To me, the film felt slow and onerously philosophical. But looking back, I realize it is full of action. I loved the stuff with the space pirates.
Better though, is the scene when the transport to Mars answers a distress signal. This is probably my favorite thing in the movie because it is so random and visceral. There’s also an uncanny amount of meaning (as well as some light foreshadowing) packed into the tense moment.
Honorable mention goes to several tense moments created by Loren Dean’s extremely panicky and incompetent Donald Stanford.
Best Scene:
I love the moment when Tommy Lee Jones looks straight into the camera and tells us what he’s done.
But what honestly redeemed the movie for me (just when it was getting too bleak and nihilistic for my tastes) is what Pitt’s character retrieves and the value he sees in it.
The Negatives:
Clearly the director of this film thinks highly of 2001. So if you think 2001 is boring, pretentious, slow, deliberately disorienting, then be prepared to have the same negative reaction to Ad Astra. On the other hand, if you think 2001 is a masterpiece, you might find Ad Astra disappointingly derivative with too many space pirates. It definitely knows it’s walking in 2001‘s shadow. But the ending owes more to Joseph Conrad than to Arthur C. Clarke. (And honestly, it’s a bit more Armageddon and upbeat than either.)
Ad Astra reminds me so much of the “becoming a man” fiction that used to baffle and frustrate me as a teen. You know, the stuff that features a boy silently participating in some ritual and coming to a realization of such profundity it cannot be expressed in words. He’s done the thing, and now he is a man. When I was very young, these types of stories made me feel stupid for not sharing in the epiphany. Then when I got a little older, I started to get a little resentful, wondering, “Are you sure you’re not just inarticulate, so you mistake your own non-verbalized thoughts for Earth shattering profundity simply because you don’t have a sounding board?” But then I got even older than that and started accepting that other people are welcome to become men if they want to, and they don’t have to reveal the secrets of it to me. I can simply watch and draw my own conclusions and talk about them as much or as little as I want.
I will say (as my husband did) that this is not the movie to watch to escape from your own thoughts and worries. It has such long, ponderous silences. And the main character, though he does share his inner reflections with us, honestly knows so little that we might not require his thoughts to understand his story. But if he didn’t think to us, the silence would be deafening.
As I watched, I kept thinking of the way our older son has always been so happy to be like his father. And as he learns or realizes new things about my husband, he adjusts his expectations and view of the world accordingly. Watching him grow up has been very enlightening for me and made me much more receptive to all this “becoming a man” fiction because I feel like I understand the process better after being able to observe it more intimately. How disconcerting it must be to discover what you always took as reality was being presented to you through a distorted lens! (I’m talking about the movie now, not my husband.)
Stories like this used to bore and frustrate me. I would think, “Well, okay, after you take some time silently figuring out if you’re a man yet or not, call me and we’ll talk.” Being a mother has made me more receptive to this type of fiction. But make no mistake this is what Ad Astra is about. It doesn’t matter how many monkeys you throw in, or if you manage to travel all the way to Neptune, or if the Earth is obliterated by external threat. All of that is just set dressing. This story is about Brad Pitt’s character becoming a fully aware, functional adult human being and deciding what the world means to him and how he will live his life.
It’s good, but don’t go in expecting anything else.
I also think that the results of the conspiracy between Helen Lantos and Roy McBride are a bit…incredible. But I tried to be as credulous as possible in the spirit of goodwill toward the film.
The only other small thing is that to me, the mysterious conspiracy element of the movie felt a bit lacking. We get all this build-up, so many suggestions, but then what we find was surely a mystery only to Roy. I feel like most people in the audience will be expecting the ending. Then again, just as Roy is able to see the value in something someone else cannot, perhaps when we look for a mysterious conspiracy in this film, we are focusing on the wrong thing and failing to appreciate what is right in front of us. (And in this case, we means me.)
Overall:
Ad Astra is a good, serious space film that fits right in with classics like 2001. It shows us that discovery is not always about distance. Sometimes the most incredible mysteries are the ones we gradually begin to unravel all around us and within ourselves. Brad Pitt gives an excellent performance, and Tommy Lee Jones blew me away in his few minutes of screen time. The supporting cast is good, the music is atmospheric, and the cinematography is always arresting, sometimes memorable. If you think 2001 is the gold standard for space films, then you’ll want to see Ad Astra.
