Director: James Gray
Starring: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga
Genre: Ad nauseam
On the Kubrick-Lucas spectrum (trademark pending), where Kubrick sci-fi films are intense and moody and so deep you can’t see the bottom of them, and Lucas sci-fi films are operatic and melodramatic and fun, with plenty of weird looking aliens, Ad Astra definitely tends Kubrick. Indeed, there seems to be a real polarising of modern sci-fi films to either extreme. Interstellar (2014), The Martian (2015) and Arrival (2016) at one end, Men in Blacks, anything Star Wars and anything based on a comic book at the other.
Ad Astra is often compared to Interstellar, and not just because of the dubious science, but because it too features daddy issues, the potential extinction of humanity and an unlikely resolution. But just because a film has depth doesn’t mean it has width. Ad Astra’s most intense scene is its first, an escape from an exploding space antenna that would do James Bond proud.
From that point on it’s a spiralling laws-of-physics defying plunge as Brad Pitt turns into an action character, killing bad guys, crazed monkeys and astronauts that should know better than to shoot guns in a space ship. And all in low or zero gravity which the film makers sometimes accurately portray but often less so.
Ad Astra is no Space Odyssey in a cinematic sense. It’s torn between a search for meaning (reinforced for the dummies by some pointless narration) and clumsy attempts at old school tension which don’t come close to anything in space starring Sigourney Weaver. Indeed, on the Alien scale of cinematic brilliance (trademark pending), where a 1 is Alien vs Predator (2004) and 10 is Aliens (1986), Ad Astra would rate about 3.
Rating: Two-and-a-half orbits.
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