Ad Astra ** (2019, Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland) – Movie Review

Ad Astra (2019) is a posh, great-looking space movie, with ambitions, but it is also slow and boring, and, in the end, much ado about nothing. It manages to pull off the rare trick of making star Brad Pitt look terrible in the most unflattering of huge close-ups.

The desperately earnest screenplay by director James Gray and by Ethan Gross focuses entirely on the slim idea of an astronaut setting out on a mission across the solar system to uncover the truth about his presumed dead father (Tommy Lee Jones), whose expedition 30 years ago is now somehow threatening mankind.

There’s a vaguely eerie, mysterious atmosphere but, frustratingly, little tension and virtually no action, and little credibility. When a little action comes, it is actually a surprise. It is a huge let-down that the story seems to be all about the usual theme of fractured father-son relationships and not the rather more cosmic and interesting threat to mankind idea at all. Mmm, $87,500,000 spent on a film about a middle-aged man who hasn’t resolved his father issues?

It is more or less a one-man show, and Pitt is fine, but it would be nice to have some other ‘real’ characters in the show that it way thin enough already. Co-stars Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland are just there, left hanging around rather briefly, so there is little they can do, and it is reasonable that they are looking rather fed up.

You do get a great sense of space and space travel, and that is the best thing about the movie, thanks to the brilliant sets and effects. James Gray says it has ‘the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie’. He has pretty much achieved that and that’s fine, though Ad Astra clearly wants to provide an update on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it does not have the stuff.

He says it’s ‘Sorta like, if you got Apocalypse Now and 2001 in a giant mash-up and you put a little [Joseph] Conrad in there.’ If James Gray wants to compare his film with Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and apparently he does, he’s in trouble. And, unfortunately, astronaut Roy McBride is not going to turn out to be one of Brad Pitt’s most iconic roles.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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