Film review: ‘Ad Astra’

Starting with the opening shots of “Ad Astra,” you suspect you’re in for something great. From a gorgeous series of outer space lens flares, Brad Pitt’s handsome face emerges. He is Major Roy McBride, an astronaut undertaking a spacewalk over Earth. A title card tells us the film takes place in the near future - we have colonies on the moon and Mars, but Kansas still plays football against Iowa State.

A surge from deep space shorts electricity across the planet and sends Roy hurtling from his perch to the ground below. He calmly survives the fall and the subsequent psychological evaluation, promising, “I will only make pragmatic decisions.”

Roy’s interior life is dominated by two spectral presences, those of his estranged wife Eve (Liv Tyler) and his father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) - the former appears in memories and the latter in low res videos.

On the plus side, Cliff McBride is the most decorated astronaut of his time; on the negative, he abandoned Roy and his mother. Cliff’s “I’m going out for a pack of smokes” moment involved taking a 16-year mission into deep space from which he had no intention of returning. In one recording from Neptune, he expresses a desire to, “Be free of your moral boundaries,” and the United States suspects that he, having pushed closer to God, aliens, or something else, might be sending those damaging surges back at Earth.

Thus Roy is tasked with flying to Mars to send a “laser message” to his dad, asking him to, if possible, stop trying to destroy human life. Our hero’s journey to the Red Planet is full of enough uncanny detail to keep things humorously plausible - on his space shuttle to a layover on the moon, there’s still that Virgin Atlantic mauve lighting (a blanket and pillow pack costs $125) and when he lands there’s a lunar Applebee’s restaurant.

“Ad Astra” has a couple surprisingly tense action scenes, including a moon rover shootout and a grisly rescue mission pit stop en route to Mars. The action is fast, matter of fact - as with Roy, the director’s pulse never rises.

James Gray has directed other excellent films but none this beautiful, from the wondrous set design on Mars to the glory of the astronauts’ mirrored gold visors. He hammers the constant theme of insane bravery as a means of escape. Cliff and Roy are willing - anxious really - to take the second star to the right, straight on to Neptune, two billion miles away.

As in the masterful “The Lost City of Z,” Gray captures men going past the point of no return - here the rings of Neptune substitute for unexplored Amazonia. The astonishing images and words of the final sequences are best left for your discovery. In the end, Gray asks: Do we want to find our fathers or be free of them?