Ad Astra review – Brad Pitt is luminous in stunning space saga

Brad Pitt is having quite the year. First he went toe to toe with Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and now he’s voyaging to the very ends of the universe in James Gray’s dazzling cosmic adventure, Ad Astra, showing us just how luminous he can be simply staring into space. With Ad Astra, Pitt’s doing what Matthew McConaughey did in Christopher Nolan’s hypnotic (and vastly underrated) sci-fi epic Interstellar – grappling with his inner demons in zero gravity.

He’s Major Roy McBride, an astronaut living a muted existence exemplified by the solitary nature of his work (and Pitt’s understated performance). After an accident involving mysterious power surges almost gets him killed, Roy’s life is complicated further by the sudden news that his father – one of the most decorated astronauts in US history, and assumed dead – might be alive. The government believe that Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), stationed close to Neptune and in possession of huge quantities of anti-matter, is the cause of the surges. They enlist Roy on a trip to colonised Mars, where they hope that beaming a voice message to his father will provoke a response.

James Gray is a director whose ambitious works have divided audiences and critics, but Ad Astra, his best and most cohesive film to date, might be the one to change a lot of minds. Working from a script he co-wrote with Ethan Gross, the usual sci-fi influences are all here, mostly because it’s impossible to deliver a beautiful shot of a spacecraft docking without evoking 2001. But there are some new ones too: Ad Astra feels indebted equally to Interstellar as it does, say, Solaris (both films share a cinematographer in Hoyte van Hoytema). It’s Apocalypse Now that Gray is riffing on most, though, and he’s not afraid to hide it. Everything from Pitt’s emotionless narration to the government briefing scene reeks of Coppola’s Vietnam-era classic. Hell, even Tommy Lee Jones – when he finally turns up – seems to be channeling the nervous energy of a character from that film (surprisingly it isn’t Brando, but Dennis Hopper’s unnamed “Photojournalist”).

What Ad Astra lacks in originality it more than makes up for in execution. Both dense with philosophy and light with plot, every frame pulsates with a deep and cosmic brilliance, an inherent desire to understand more and go further. There are daddy issues abound, existential ruminations on the nature of father-son relationships, and – as in all good science-fiction – questions about what it means to be human. Ad Astra asks how far we’ll go to understand who we are. In Roy’s case, the answer is roughly 2.7 billion miles.

Make no mistake: despite its Malickian musings, Ad Astra is still pulp of the highest order. This is a film, after all, in which pirates traverse the moon, rage-filled baboons take over spaceships, and astronauts fight with knives in zero gravity. And whilst it’s true that many of these blockbuster-y moments often feel at odds with the film’s otherwise contemplative, poetic tone, it’s this strange clash – the battle between big genre movie and arthouse meditation – that gives Ad Astra its unique energy.

It’s not a film that holds up under scrutiny in any literal sense (why did they need Roy to go all the way to Mars? Couldn’t they have carried a voice message from Earth?), nor does it seem to care  – or matter. Gray isn’t afraid to resort to cliché to tell his story, either. One scene has him reading the prewritten speech that will be beamed to his father. We know that no response will come, of course, unless he goes off book and speaks from the heart. You can picture what comes next before it happens: Roy starting to ad-lib, a technician in the control room panicking, a superior raising his hand as if to say, “Wait. Let him finish.” And yet these familiar moments only serve to reinforce the idea of a deeply classical story playing out on a cosmic scale.

In a movie packed with stars, Pitt might be the brightest star of all. So handsome and elegantly weary here that he rivals the rings of Neptune for most beautiful thing in the film, his face – now slightly marked with age, light shimmering in his eyes – looks designed to be seen through the lens of a camera. Somehow, he seems more at ease – more accepting of the inevitabilities of life  – than in any previous role to date. It’s a mesmerising turn in a wholly mesmerising film. When it finally brings you back down to Earth, there’s a good chance you won’t want it to.