McBride is an ageing, disconsolate astronaut who embarks on a mission to Neptune to investigate the cause of several power surges coming from a lost voyager ship, which have been wreaking havoc on earth’s electric systems and threatens all life on the planet. This lost ship also coincidentally belongs to McBride’s father, who has been missing for 15 years after leaving on a voyager mission to find non-human intelligent life. Now he embarks on a personal mission to try to reconnect with his father with the fate of the world in his hands and a god’s fistful of space between.
What Ad Astra initially tries to be is a space opera that has existential crisis and the meaninglessness of human efforts flowing through its veins. Its bold cinematic views of the void of space and McBride’s slow journeying through countless uncaring environments and security checks definitely bark those usual stare-into-the-abyss-the-abyss-stares-back-at-you life checks. But while countless space productions before have grabbed you by the ears, thrown your face up to the night sky and whispered ‘Nothing matters. Isn’t that some scary shit?’ into your ear while you’re trying to squirm and kick free, where Ad Astra most notably succeeds in originally communicating its moral horror with the vastness of space lies in its use of Brad Pitt performance as McBride.
While the man has had a legacy of heavy, charismatic performances, he takes quite a different turn here, executing a very internal, isolated and even sympathetic role as the experienced little spaceman. The film’s thankfully slow pacing and editing lets you seep into all his facial expressions and the weighty emotions below the surface fantastically. This marks a welcome return to form of the slow-paced space voyager, undoubtably giving you the time to sink into its many landscapes and stylish cinematic scope to feel that creeping void around McBride’s teeth and the singular objective far out of reach.
But Pitt’s performance and the space’s quiet character is somewhat tainted by the film’s odd need to spoon-feed you every bit of intended emotional reaction through his frequent voice-over narrative, Gray seeming quite insecure with having such a quiet main performance and therefore insists you hear every thought that goes through McBride’s head instead. This proves quite annoying when you have yet another melancholic monologue on humanity’s eternal stupidity and disconnection with reality every time he walks down a flight of stairs, which ironically disconnects you from the film’s world. A greatly suspenseful scene involving a dogfight with buggies on a gorgeous moon landscape even kicks you out the mood when Pitt does yet another monologue while shrapnel blitzes everywhere and people on each side are getting blown.
I could count more times where removing the narration in a scene of Ad Astra wouldn’t have distorted the narrative a bit, and would’ve even treated the audience with a bit more respect, than stars in the (okay fine, bit of a stretch but you get what I mean). Drive, for example has a deathly quiet protagonist but doesn’t intrude us in on his thoughts and mostly leaves it all up to the many close-ups on his face to understand his character, which succeeds while also giving that needed kick of ambiguity to get drawn into him and the plot. We don’t need to hear Gosling think ‘What a pleasingly melancholic night. Perfectly matches my sociopathic tendencies.’ to understand the type of journey and undertones he’s going through. That asteroid seems to go way over Ad Astra’s head. Hell, if Astra was set in the Star Trek universe, Pitt would likely be self-debating over the true meaning of Jesus Christ while getting madly chased by Klingons.
But it’s not to say the overabundance of voiceovers don’t make Ad Astra unwatchable. Scenes such as the opening, where he falls from a giant satellite and has to keep himself steady are breath-taking and our glimpses into his mind connect us more with his spectacularly deadly situation. We also thankfully get a few scenes showing an intense situation unfold around Pitt with only his expressions to go by, such as when he’s waiting for a transmission from his father and when he gets hit with the mission debrief. But his relationship with his father is nonetheless sadly blurred from the narrative with several abrupt action scenes killing the slow-burn lonely journey, one being so absurd you get chucked from Pitt’s strained hopes and decaying condition for quite a while with what buffoonery you just beheld.
But Ad Astra’s finale blissfully captures that gloomy final-destination feel greatly. The grand scale of the nearby Neptune amplifies the isolation factor, as well as the long-grudging sole-destination journey (interrupted several times, perhaps, but still mostly kept at the film’s front) paying off as best it can with good pacing and dialogue and brings an emotional resolution but then an admittedly ridiculous return that leaves a few more sunspots on this film.
Ad Astra is a stunning film full of good cinematography, space-exploration and a mostly snail’s pace narrative which brings out Pitt’s inner-demons. But its wide-open insecurity in itself is what ultimately betrays it, with its woke refusal to accept its uneventfulness, rather than embracing it to uniquely deliver a full-focus lonely journey, leads to several abrupt action scenes that are forgotten as quickly as they appeared and its babysitter treatment of the audience, with Pitt mentally noting his thoughts on the passive look his partner just gave him in case anyone gets bored or confused. There are tonnes of computer-effect environments which are excellent on their own but sadly get sucked, with its screams drowned, into the void of artist space, with surrounding films like Gravity and The Martian executing just as impressive achievements years before. Despite Pitt’s passionate performance, this is a film very much welcoming to those unfamiliar with the space genre but its unoriginality and flaws slip it away from the cult classics into another miniscule rocky asteroid orbiting around 2001.