OVP: Ad Astra (2019)

Film: Ad Astra (2019)
Stars: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland
Director: James Gray
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound Mixing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

In recent years, we've seen a plethora of space epics that take place closer to home.  Gone are film franchises (well, not gone, but alongside of in this case) like Star Wars and Star Trek, where we are venturing into galaxies unknown, and instead we see movies like Gravity, The Martian, and First Man, films that take place right outside of our front door, and feel within reach.  Ad Astra is another installment in such a trend, but it still manages to take us to worlds' unknown.  A film whose focus is on finding ourselves as we venture into the furthest corners of the solar system, Ad Astra is a gargantuan movie, one that feels like James Gray has crossed paths between the best of Christopher Nolan and the most coherent of Terrence Malick, to come out a provocative case study of one man's obsession with the truth, and another's need to observe the world he's been given.

(Spoilers Ahead) Roy McBride (Pitt) is the son of space legend Clifford McBride (Jones), a hero of the space age who when Roy was young, went off into space to try and find extraterrestrial life, but ultimately was lost, never to return evidence of such an encounter.  Years later, his son has followed into his footsteps, and is convinced by the government that his father is not, in fact, presumed dead, but still alive, at the outskirts of the solar system.  His ship is potentially causing surges back on earth, which are threatening all human life.  Roy must go to Mars to launch communication to his father, in a vain hope to stop him (or let him know that he is still alive and needs to be stopped).  However, Roy decides to go all the way to Neptune to meet his father, in the process becoming part of a solo mission after all of the people onboard attack him on command's orders.  Once he reaches Neptune, he discovers that his father was not a hero, but a man driven mad by loneliness who killed his entire crew, and despite years at the periphery of space, has not given up hope of finding alien life in the universe.  Roy tries to rescue Cliff, but Cliff doesn't want to be rescued and face what he left behind, and admits he never really cared about any of it, including Roy.  Roy lets his father physically and metaphorically go, and stops the surges, with him eventually returning to earth to share his father's data, that there is no other intelligent life in the universe, and reconnects with his estranged wife Eva (Tyler).

This is the basic plot of Ad Astra, but it's a film that's hard to summarize into just simple pieces, as the best moments of Gray's epic are actually just tiny little chapters in the film that show what life is like in a world where Earth, the Moon, and Mars are actually connected, and not just three different rocks orbiting the sun.  The scene where lunar rovers try to kill Roy for simply driving over their share of the moon, seemingly for no other reason than territorial violence, speaks to man's need to constantly control, even in the most remote of places.  And the shocking, bloody sequence with the baboons literally floating around in space, having murdered & overpowered the astronauts of their scientific expedition, is jaw-dropping in its intensity (and scary as hell).  Gray's film is gorgeous, but it also gives us a look at how alien worlds will still be so distant from our own.  The film's central tenet, at least in terms of Tommy Lee Jones's character, is the question of whether life exists beyond our planet; Gray shows here that even if it does, it will still feel out-of-reach and alien, impossible for us to properly connect with it.

The final scenes with Pitt & Jones are probably the best.  Pitt, so good at letting his gorgeous, expressive eyes and face do the talking for him with introverted characters, watches as the man he has modeled his whole life around falls apart before him, his stony visage crumbling as we learn he's a person who couldn't handle failure, or at least the answer "no" to his life's mission.  Jones is only in a small scene, but he's perfectly cast as Cliff, a man who couldn't handle the idea that all of space was just vast & cavernous, not filled with other creatures like himself.  Gray's message with Ad Astra is ultimately one of hope in showing it is Roy, not Cliff, who must continue on after this journey, even though Cliff's is the quest we as humans are obsessed with knowing.  Roy is there to show us that what we have on earth is precious enough that we should protect that even if it means that we don't know the answers of the universe.  It's an optimistic moment for a man who has not allowed himself any sort of emotion; everything you want in life is right here, you just need to allow yourself the vulnerability to find it.  Ad Astra is a gorgeous, sumptuous feast, but it's also about two men's journeys into the unknown, and the strength to come back not knowing the answers to the questions you sought to learn.