Ad Astra (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

AD ASTRA follows the journey of a man with a singular intention to fulfil his purpose. Nothing will stand in his way. It’s a huge purpose for he is an astronaut who has been charged with a mission to save the world from a series of pulses, surges, which are emanating from the point where his father, the head of an exploratory mission to the outer reaches of the solar system, was last detected.

The film takes two profound but related narrative tropes, “a man travelling home, finds at the end of his journey not his home but his own true self” and “a man travelling up a river, finds at the end of his journey not only his destination but also a revelation about mankind’s true place in the world”, and melds them into one journey story.

So far, so good.

The greatest film example of the first trope might be THE SWIMMER, in which Burt Lancaster swam home across Connecticut via his friends’ swimming pools, only to discover that the closer he got to his home the heavier his heart weighed until he had to face something he had been denying himself: that home was no longer what it once was.

A prime example of the second is Willard travelling up the river in APOCALYPSE NOW to find not only Kurtz but also the blunt and poetic savagery at the centre of man’s heart.

AD ASTRA is brave enough to want to be as profound as The Swimmer and Apocalypse Now. If it doesn’t quite get there, it fails in an interesting way.

Brad Pitt is excellent as Roy McBride, the astronaut making the journey. His character suffers / benefits from having a heart rate like Bjorn Borg’s. His pulse rate is low and supernaturally healthy, and it barely rises even when he is confronted by peril or danger. However, the hero’s heart rate also sets the tone for the deployment of tension in the narrative and it might, for some viewers, contribute to the film feeling torpid. The director, James Gray, refuses to create excitement where any other director would salivate at the prospect, even when its hero confronts things as winningly spectacular as moon-pirates or space-monkeys. Yes, space-monkeys.

This dispassion reminded me of Robert Wise’s THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, which, through Michael Crichton’s predilection for science, was able to step back and not panic at its own story, instead letting the end-of-the-world scenario play out as though observed by a haughty scientist until nature took its course and reasserted itself. Phew. No need to break a sweat.

AD ASTRA marries its narrative dispassion with breath-taking and beautiful imagery. The beauty being not only the journey into space in all its wondrous glory but also the loving close-ups of Brad Pitt’s face. I say that without irony. Brad is beautiful to look at, and his low-key performance provides the slow dynamo for the film’s progression through to its endpoint, where both story tropes are resolved. Brad comes to an understanding of man’s place in the universe and who he is at home