AD ASTRA (2019) **

 

James Gray’s Ad Astra is a ponderous and slow-moving film.  It’s also strangely beautiful.  The combination of cool visuals, droning music, and soothing even-toned voices is downright hypnotic.  I’ve seen plenty of movies that have put me to sleep.  This one put me in a trance.  Once I eventually snapped out of it, I was surprised to learn that it was half over.  I just chalked that up to me being overly tired and watching it at a late hour.  I decided I’d come back to it the next day and give it another shot.  I’ll be damned if it didn’t make me zone out again. 

Unfortunately, the hypnotic visuals are at odds with the derivative narrative.  It’s basically Apocalypse Now meets 2001:  A Space Odyssey, but there also some nods to other films along the way.  There’s a scene in which some astronauts attempt to hold up a moon buggy that is framed like a stagecoach robbery in an old western, which of course, makes you immediately think of the space-age western-style hijinks of Moon Zero Two.  We also get a completely random monkey attack that feels like a Zero-G version of Link.  It’s an uneven mix of stuff to be sure.  (There are moments that will make you think of Gravity and Blade Runner too.)

Brad Pitt stars as an astronaut whose father (Tommy Lee Jones) disappeared around the rings of Neptune.  After years of not knowing what happened to his father, he gets word that his dear old dad just might be alive after all.  Unfortunately, there’s a high probability he’s plotting a mutiny that could possibly destroy all life on Earth.

Pitt is good.  He dials himself way down for this one.  His character is cool as a cucumber, as his heart rate never rises about 80 BPM, even during the most perilous calamity.  His laid-back demeanor is a good fit with the calming, picturesque space vistas.

While Ad Astra is always a visual feast, the meat of the story is paper thin at best.  It also doesn’t help that Gray treats all this with such grave seriousness that it leaves little room for a sense of wonder or adventure.  This approach could’ve worked if the film as a whole was meditative in nature.  However, those hokey bits (like the aforementioned rabid monkey attack) promptly undo any sort of hoity-toity aspirations Gray might’ve had for the picture.  Then again, if it wasn’t for the screeching of the killer monkey, I might not have ever snapped out of my trance.

Ad Astra might’ve skated by with a ** ½ rating on visuals alone, but the final act is so heavy handed that it almost feels like a parody.  The final scenes between father and son are painfully obvious and more than a little maudlin.  I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a male version of a Lifetime Movie set in space, but if there is, this is about as close to one as we’re likely ever to get.