This Month in Indie: Ad Astra
*MILD SPOILERS AHEAD*
Despite starring in Quentin Tarantino’s highly-anticipated late Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, everyone’s favorite pretty face, Brad Pitt, was not finished making his acting return. Produced by the leading man’s very own Plan B Entertainment and 20th Century Fox, Ad Astra follow’s Pitt’s Roy McBride into space to solve some much needed daddy issues opposite Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland, and more.
Just one week after its US release and James Gray’s partially-independent film has already accumulated almost half of its $87.5 million budget. What about this quiet voyage to the planets beyond made it such a standout of the Venice Film Festival and later in the box office? Allow me to take you through it piece by piece.
Plot and Story
In its barest of bones, Ad Astra is a tender story of a son (Pitt) sent to retrieve his highly-decorated father (Jones) after learning of his involvement in a space project whose research is causing unprecedented atmospheric repercussions.
Most stories that are this simple and precise usually rely on subplots to provide layering and detail to hook audiences in; Ad Astra needs nothing of the sort. Instead, as I’ll talk about later, this film visually delivers for the galactically-curious which helps soak up any negative space in the plot so there’s always something to tap into. This then allows writers Gray and Ethan Gross to make Roy McBride’s character painfully clear and all of his decisions completely understandable as he navigates through the world he thought he knew.
There are not enough words to describe how crucial this approach to storytelling is to world-building. If audiences know from the first five minutes that Roy spends most of his time consumed by his work, seeing Eve (Liv Tyler) out-of-focus in the background tells them all they need to know about his ability to consider the lives of those close to him. And even more brilliantly, they would be clued in from Roy’s actions throughout the film and finally so when his father admits that he himself didn’t care about the young Roy nor his mother when he was stationed at Neptune those 30 years ago.
So what do we know? Roy McBride is an unshakeable astronaut, he is incapable of handling complex romantic relationships because he’s too busy being unshakeable, and he’s ridiculously stubborn with a complicated father-son relationship. And you’ve learned all of that from the first ten minutes of this 123-minute feature; now that’s what I call effective writing.
Tommy Lee Jones’s Clifford McBride doesn’t appear in his full human form until the last 30 minutes of the film, so the audience is left clinging to Roy’s memories as a means of characterizing the juggernaut. As Roy encounters new peers who frequently tell him what an honor it is to work with him as the son of a legend, he and the audience progressively question whether or not that title is truly worth it. If his father were such a legend, what would he have to hide? Why would he hide? Roy’s voiceover ponders these questions aloud while audiences think them as his search for answers grows deeper and more violent.
When his higher-ups first approach him with the mission, they don’t explain that he’s going to Mars (by way of the Moon) solely to record a voice message coaxing his father to return contact. An injured Thomas Pruitt (Sutherland) passes along a top secret message that reveals that the elder McBride will ultimately be killed rather than rescued. This locks Roy into following through on his mission and killing almost everyone in his path as he slowly loses his mind in the solace.
Truthfully, there isn’t much else to say about Ad Astra’s plot and story and I wouldn’t think that a necessarily negative thing. Sticking to the simplicity of a family drama offers more time for the audience to fully register Roy’s obstacles and process his ways of getting out of them. It also makes for seeing these actors interact with each other an enjoyable experience, namely when Natasha Lyonne cameos as an overly-qualified Mars receptionist. Pitt’s performance is most definitely one for the books which is probably thanks to him not chewing gum or licking his lips before delivering a dazzling smile.
I give Ad Astra’s plot and story a 10/10.
Visuals: Photography, Editing, and Production Design
James Gray did not come to play when shaping this space drama. As the story left room for world-building from the production design and other visuals, Gray and Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema took full advantage of any and every possible gap.
In a recent interview with Vulture Magazine, Gray talks about how they achieved the Mars and Moon landscapes. “[The Jet Propulsion Lab] gave us their high-res images of the moon and of Mars. So in the movie, the surfaces of the ground are moon and Mars,” making this film a pioneer in achieving photo-realism considering most of us might not ever make it there.
Scenes on Earth feature more earth-tones delivered in the green of the US Military’s uniforms, browns of the wooden tables and paneled walls, and taupes of Roy’s own residence. The Moon is expectedly gray and Mars quite orange, giving attention to the static wide shots that allow Ruth Negga to walk into focus or Roy himself to pace in a meditation room as he waits for his pulse to decrease.
Ad Astra is set at some point in the future, so its technology is swanky, but also not far off from what we already have. Roy is able to record his debriefs while his pulse is monitored by the International Space Station’s artificial intelligence platform, Cepheus. He receives video messages that pop up on his cell phone that’s made entirely of glass. Most importantly, however, every planetary location has a fully-operational base that runs so smoothly they had to have been around for at least 20 years. These features help transport audiences to another planet, but still feel as though we’re shadowing someone at their job that requires them to face space pirates on Rovers.
I highly recommend that article for further details about getting those shots just right, but based on what I know, I give this film’s visuals a 10/10.
Music and Sound
Just as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk featured Hans Zimmer’s melodic ticking and Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk had Nicholas Britell’s emotional swells in his composition, Ad Astra employs the auditory genius of composer Max Richter in between Brad Pitt’s soothing voiceovers. Richter, known for his tear-jerking tunes in HBO’s The Leftovers, brings a similar plan of attack to Gray’s space family drama. Light pianos litter the atmosphere as Roy gets closer to Neptune to confront his father and simultaneously grows more mentally disheveled.
This film joins other “This Month in Indie” installments in its strong and silent type. Ambient noise does a good amount of the leg work in this film as well which solidifies in making the audience believe they’re in space with Roy and in a rush to solve the mystery of his father alongside him. I’m personally not the biggest fan of voiceovers being a predominant narrative feature, but over time as it was interspersed with the intentional classical score I was better able to tolerate it.
Dramatic moments like Roy falling off of the rig and back down to Earth in the beginning is ultimately quiet and so are most of the moments in Ad Astra. Explosions, space conflicts, and blaring alarms take up more of those moments rather than a large swelling score like one might find in Interstellar. For this reason, I would give the music and sound an 8/10.
Overall, Ad Astra delivers in making audiences feel like space travel is already happening and could be moving at a faster rate than many would think, leaving room for them to ponder whether or not the Earth is even worth saving. This film receives an overall 28/30 and if you’re not already at your local theater, it better be because you were binging Brad Pitt interviews and falling in love with his passionate side.
