Ad Astra!
AD ASTRA
I have been thinking about this film since I saw it last week- in Imax, at 11am on a Saturday morning, alone. I wanted to be washed over by an immense screen, sharp details and vastness sweeping me up in the warmth of a dark movie theater. Ahh, the holy ritual of the movies.
I did not have much of an idea of what the film would be about, other than Brad Pitt in space. Ad Astra follows the astronaut Roy McBride at an unknown point in the near future. Humanity has expanded our space travel, set up bleak, small civilizations on the moon and Mars, and we have travelled into the depths of our solar system. McBride is one of the best astronauts in near future America, meticulous, level-headed, and emotionally removed, yet something appears to be missing in his life. His father was a famous astronaut who disappeared 30 years ago on a mission to reach Neptune. In the beginning of the film, earth comes under threat from mysterious energy surges that may be tied to the elder McBride’s disappearance and lost mission, and Roy is tasked with traveling into the solar system to get a message to his father’s ship.
This film really struck me in ways I did not anticipate. Of course, there were the visual and sensory aspects of the film. It was visually, one of the most stunning and compelling movies I have seen, planting us into a realistic, eery world of space travel, from the corporate, industrialized, fluorescently lit hallways of space settlements, to the skies and landscapes of earth upon re-entry, to the lunar and mars landscapes, to the infinite, endless, unimaginable depths of space, and particularly the later half of the film as Roy travels into space, and the stunning final sequences around Neptune.
I have yet to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, my bad, I know. But I imagine that Ad Astra has some parallels to this film. Ad Astra is psychological examination of one man, and also a larger comment on the strivings of humanity into the future.
Roy McBride is a cold, lonely man, shaped by his father, Clifford McBride a disciplined and enigmatic figure, who taught him principles of hard work, determination, and a single-mindedness in their push to move humanity forward into the beyond. The son attempts to emulate his father, who disappeared onto his mission and then into thin space air when Roy was a young man, a father he spent years mythologizing. Yet, these values of ambition, determination, and a one-tracked, scientific approach to a higher mission leave Roy bereft of love and connection. What are other humans to the strivings for space exploration and finding extra terrestrial life? What are the higher ideals of life, and are love and vulnerability simple weaknesses in the face of infinite space? Roy faces the glory of space, through his own acumen and steely determination, and he and the viewer marvel. But also, throughout the film he begins to explore his own fallibility, his selfishness and isolation, and begin to see what he values in his life and how he wants to change.
Ad Astra is a philosophical, visually stunning, surprisingly emotional, slow burn of a film, and I enjoyed its cosmic reach.
