Ad Astra (dir. James Gray, 2019)
✭✭✭✭✩
If the genre of science fiction repeatedly finds itself, as the title offers, looking per aspera ad astra – from the Latin, “through hardships to the stars” – director James Gray returns the gaze, turning instead to the onlooker themselves. Brad Pitt is subject to an almost painterly study, his emotional muteness viewed with an intensity that rivals Miloš Forman’s scrutiny to the expressive script of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the contours of skin, every facial tick, slur, or pause, as fathomless as the gulf between planets. Ad Astra knowingly plays into the traditions and grammar of space opera, its thrilling ambition met with typical unoriginality. Opening in the “near future” – its blazing red typography somewhat Bladerunner-inspired – Gray paves a transcendent, Conradian journey that staggers from planet to planet, eventually settling on the blue expanse of Neptune (a rarely used, planetary set piece). It is a story of fathers and sons, or rather fatherless sons, whose Freudian longings for something more dismantle the stability of their present. Space becomes a harbour for such internal damage, a site for the dispossessed – the lunar plane, for example, a focal point of territory warfare – which, over the course of its two-hour runtime, sees its drifting astronauts yearn for firmer groundings. Inseparable from prior instalments in the sci-fi genre, Interstellar, Gravity and Sunshine the most immediate examples, Ad Astra’s voltage inspires a sense of wonder and uncomplicated mystery with each passing scene.
Brad Pitt continues his year of acclaimed roles with Major Roy McBride, the abandoned son to famed Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) – “the first man to the outer solar system […] a pioneer” – whose career in astronomics seeks to leave the shadow of, and honour, his inherited paternal legacy. In the wake of a series of paralysing, anti-matter surges, Roy is employed by U.S. Space Command to investigate, an operation that leads him to make contact with the resurrected ghost of his father – long since considered dead. (Much like Schrödinger’s cat in a steel chamber, the father is neither dead nor alive, at first, as much a figment of imaginings as he is of reality.) Clifford had originally headed the “Lima Project”, oriented in its quest to find extra-terrestrial life, whilst in orbit of Neptune, though it had since been ruled defunct by its radio silence. Such an allure, as originally sketched in Tarkovsky’s psychodrama Solaris (and its later 2002 remake), opens its protagonist to an intellectual and philosophical risk. In space, no one can hear you scream … or meditate on life, you might also argue.
It is during Pitt’s introspective musings, as captured by a roughly-whispered voiceover (in the style of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life or To the Wonder), that director James Gray distinguishes Ad Astra from the current trend of mainstream blockbusters. Re-treading his arthouse/euro-indie roots, Gray requires more than banal thrills from his audience, daring us to wait out his silences, carefully hold each word, and allow each moment to contribute to a far greater whole. “What did he find out there, in the abyss?” Roy asks hesitantly, a question posed as much to himself as it is to a wider community. Ad Astra, moreover, is not the first time its leading star, Brad Pitt, has acted alongside the use of voiceover. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik’s 2007 revisionist epic, also engages a similar effect, the dramatization of the titular killing guided with a storyteller-like, third-person narration. If to this narrative it felt supercilious, it can be argued that Gray is more explicitly successful (with the occasional laughable moment) – ponderous thoughts carried with the gradually drawn cinematography of Hoyte van Hoyten, resting finally on day-old stubble or the wrinkles in the corner of eyes. It is a wonderful and highly satisfying effect.
“I've got my wife and children and they're great, and I can find plenty of joy in that,” Gray assured in an interview for Digital Spy, discussing the possibility of encountering alien life, "[but] to rely on false Gods, the idea that there's these little green men out there that'll either save us or eat us, to me that's more horrifying than having to rely on other people." It is by questioning our reliance on myth and conjecture that we are forced, when watching Ad Astra, to re-focus our ideals, if for a moment – the fictions of space exploration revealed to be simply that, fictitious, especially when we come to realise that no other life accompanies our voyage. In this case, and by pulling the carpet from beneath our feet, Ad Astra might be said to be offer a family drama more than anything else, a movement away from cheap fantasy and instead turning inward, looking far closer, far more intently at ourselves. Clifford is a relic of this old ambition, a symbolic marker of what could be achieved, and his son a force to subdue this misanthropy, a lens by which to correct the dreams of another. “The enemy up here is not a person or a thing. It’s the endless void,” a sentiment captured in the recurring image of a helmet visor – at once reflecting space and, again, faintly revealing the profile of its astronaut.
Ad Astra is a beautifully simple picture that clothes itself with sustained philosophic reflection. If you choose to watch it, you must look past these obscuring elements to the universality of its narrative – I certainly found myself in several places. Gray undoubtedly built the apparatus of its narrative whilst looking to rival the same grandeur as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yet, unlike the top-heavy nostalgia of films such as Interstellar, Ad Astra manages to subtly navigate its source material, achieving an effective counterweight to its intelligent agenda. Spectacle is found equally in the dazzling set pieces as it is the lyrical wonderings of Roy McBride, a wonderfully unstrained performance from Brad Pitt. It is possible that some of the ideas and their realisation here will be usurped, possibly even bettered, with later additions to the genre, but what we are given, nevertheless, is a pure example of what the wonders of cinema can achieve.
