Ad Astra review: Brad Pitt’s banal space adventure is a bad trip

Ad Astra may be technologically impressive on the biggest screen possible, but as a narrative, it’s a dull pastiche of better features.

Director James Gray spends his features looking inside the dark soul of a person, pulling out questions of life, legacy, and personal ambition. His previous feature, The Lost City of Z, was a biting exploration of fathers and sons and navigating a man’s own history.

So, if you’ve seen that, it’s hard not to look at Ad Astra as that same story, simply moved out of the jungle and into the stars. Ad Astra is technologically breathtaking, but its narrative is a sleepy tale of daddy issues with Brad Pitt emerging from his most engaging role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, left to make sad eyes for two hours.

Roy McBride (Pitt) is an astronaut tasked with taking a mission to the outer edges of the solar system. The mission has added importance, as Earth is in danger due to a series of unknown solar storms. As McBride preps for travel, he realizes that his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who went missing years ago in a similar space exploration, might be responsible for what’s happening on Earth.

Much is being made about Ad Astra’s cinematography, attributed to Oscar nominee Hoyte Van Hoytema, and it is the film’s biggest asset. From Roy’s introduction working on a satellite orbiting Earth to his eventual journey to Mars and Neptune, everything is utterly amazing. The film is playing in IMAX and Dolby widescreens, and if you have the opportunity (and, more importantly, the money) to see it, it’s worth it purely on a technical level.

However, it’s hard to justify seeing a movie based on its cinematography alone, particularly with movie tickets as pricey as they are. Because on a narrative-level, Ad Astra is a snoozefest. To his credit, Gray’s features have always had a slow, methodical pace to them, but Ad Astra feels like it suffered the most from studio interference and the need to be a four-quadrant movie. Trailers for the film are playing it up as an action-adventure tale of fathers and sons that immediately drew comparisons to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

Only the bare minimum is known about Roy and his father, H. Clifford McBride. We know both are astronauts married to their job; Roy’s wife….girlfriend….lady, Eve (Liv Tyler), has left him, while his father left Roy and his mother at a young age.

Even the Earth in this movie is ill-defined. Is the movie in the future? The arrival of the solar storms are presented as being dangerous, but outside of a few stray news broadcasts, there’s no sense of imminent fear or terror short of characters telling Roy how dire the mission is.

Pitt is the only person the audience cares about during the two-hour runtime. Ruth Negga and Tommy Lee Jones pop up, but they’re only there to serve Pitt’s arc, to either give him a reason to press on or provide necessary exposition that might pass for characterization.

Pitt spends much of the movie making hang-dog faces, talking in a flat, affectless monotone that doesn’t give the audience much insight into his mental state. That might explain why the entire movie is focused on him doing regular psychological evaluations. This also permeates Pitt’s chronic narration of the feature, which plays like a required studio note to give the audience more insight into things and prohibit Ad Astra from being a silent film.

You’d assume that the film is leading to a grand showdown or some type of revelation, and you should strap in for disappointment. Without spoiling anything, Ad Astra’s grandest revelation is that men are desperate to believe their work will mean something — and if that’s not the case, too bad.

Roy’s issues with his father are left unresolved, with Jones being the picture of apathy in a small role that probably constituted 48 hours of work. For Gray, maybe that’s the point. Maybe man’s greatest fear is that they’re unloved and nothing they do will amount to anything. But then, what’s the point of watching this movie?

Ad Astra took several years to get to theaters, and the experience of watching it is similar. It’s sad to be so negative, considering how hard Gray works to produce movies, but Ad Astra‘s legacy will be as the best method to cure insomnia.

Have you seen Ad Astra? Share your thoughts about the film in the comments below.