To infinity and beyond. James Gray’s Ad Astra, set in the future, takes us to the planets and back with little Buzz Lightyear braggadocio, but with so much weighty rumination it would sink any believable spaceship. The spaceships aren’t quite believable here. But for an hour they are capriciously compelling, even when hosting the trans-spatial soliloquies of Brad Pitt. He plays an astronaut sent to meet his dad — Tommy Lee Jones in the briefing photographs — who is “still alive, near Neptune” and the last survivor of a mission gone rogue.
Cosmic ray surges have resulted in “the uncontrolled release of antimatter”. Calamities are occurring Earth-wide; 43,000 people have died. Pitt has to be the best man to send, since Colonel Kurtz — sorry, I’m thinking Heart of Darkness (and so, I suspect, is film-maker Gray) — since Prospero — sorry, I’m thinking The Tempest (ditto) — since Clifford Mcbride (Jones) is not just his dad but very possibly his dark, fathering, necromantic other self.
How to travel to Neptune? In a film like this, it’s pretty much like getting from Wandsworth to Wimbledon, allowing for the odd exploding bus in Tooting or adventure with zero gravity in Colliers Wood. The Moon and Mars will be stopovers. Just try to avoid the old guy on the cosmic bus route who offers you DIY route guidance. He will be played in a scary, witchy, entertaining cameo by Donald Sutherland.
James Gray made The Lost City of Z and before that a series of chamber movies about the displaced or misplaced (We Own the Night, The Immigrant). He likes adventures, but he likes mind music too. Ad Astra tries to be both. But instead of marrying, they are mostly at each other’s throats.
We think excitedly “Ooh, Gravity again!” in scene one, when Pitt is thrown from the giant space mast he is helping to fix; later again when he free-whirls through voids, battling rubble while hopscotching between space vessels. Elsewhere comes the monologuing, of which there is much. Freudianism 101 — “I don’t want to be my dad” — is mixed with that other prime number in sci-fi metaphysics, 2001. Pitt’s character is his very own HAL 9000. And, at risk of giving you too much shopping to carry, his Prince Hal too to his father’s “uneasy lies the head” cosmic crown-wearer.
In the Relativity Theory of filmwatching, too much almost always adds up to too little. By climax time, Ad Astra has accumulated so many echoes we realise we are in emptiness. After promising us bounty (including a mutiny to precede and set the plot), Gray delivers a boom chamber. There are wonderful moments, including a lunar “car chase” with space pirates, and some production-design deliriums out of Michael Powell by Salvador Dalí. But psychological platitude, Oedipal cliché and holistic commonplace about love and humanity can’t be hidden by attractive clutter and kinetic action, even in space.
