Tag: Interstellar

James Gray’s new sprawling, ambitious science fiction epic Ad Astra confounds many initial expectations.  The Buzz Lightyear-type sentiment suggested by the title (a literal translation of the Latin phrase is “To the Stars”) seems somewhat ironic, given that a pall of something like existential dread seems to hang over the film’s events and is the abiding impression left afterwards, even if the main existential crisis is ultimately resolved.   The film sits neatly alongside other recent sci-fi epics such as Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), also concerned with profound questions of human destiny confronted with a vast, timeless and indifferent universe. Ad Astra also shares a cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, with the latter film, which accounts for its familiar, often arresting visual style, and evocative rendering of landscapes and spacescapes far beyond Earth.

The film’s setting is an indeterminate “near future” where the scarcity of resources has bequeathed a fraught era of global conflict that seemingly leaves no quarter of the solar system untouched, even the lunar surface itself. This conflict, with its attendant lawlessness, would be bad enough, but the film’s immediate existential threat comes in the form of massive power surges thought to emanate from the mysterious Lima Project, a mission attempting to locate intelligent life beyond Earth.  The mission and its crew disappeared without trace 16 years previously in orbit around Neptune, and its commanding officer, the revered astronaut H Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) was thought to be long dead, until new evidence suggests that he has not only survived but may well now be the instigator of the mysterious power surges. McBride’s son, Roy (Brad Pitt) is also an accomplished astronaut who narrowly survives a fall from a giant space antenna caused by one of the power surges and is consequently tapped by SpaceCom to attempt to communicate and reason with his father and thereby head off the looming apocalypse.

However, ironically for a film whose chief protagonist is an emotionally distant astronaut, searching for a similarly impaired father, Gray’s screenplay also keeps us, the audience, at arm’s length. Pitt’s McBride is a driven, single-minded, solitary figure, whose resting pulse rate, we are told early on, never rises above 80. Clearly, he is meant to exude the kind of “right stuff” always portrayed as the NASA ideal: calm, rational, unflappable, superbly trained even in such esoteric skills as zero gravity hand-to-hand combat. But his singular resolve has obvious negative ramifications for his personal relationships; his estranged wife (Liv Tyler in a fleeting, thankless, virtually non-speaking role) is the principal wronged party in this regard. Pitt’s is a curiously bloodless performance; the only real insights we are afforded into his inner life come in the form of his narration of regular psychological evaluations rendered in a flat, dispassionate monotone.  And as such, the film asks a great deal of the audience’s suspension of disbelief, even more so than most similarly themed sci-fi epics. We are asked to believe that McBride is able to stow away in clandestine fashion on board a mission to Neptune that seems strangely devoid of basic security measures, even in an overriding atmosphere of global tension.  McBride’s unauthorised presence on the Neptune mission also results, somewhat mysteriously, in the death of the entire crew, an outcome for which McBride expresses remorse but only briefly, and for which he seemingly suffers no adverse consequences after his (very) unlikely return to Earth. Ah well, omelettes and eggs, or so we are apparently meant to assume.

Certainly no one could accuse Gray’s film of lacking ambition, normally no bad thing in a modern cinema environment characterised by formulaic conservatism.  It purports to tell an intimate, personal tale of father /son estrangement and (possible) reconciliation, set against a backdrop of interplanetary adventure and existential crisis.  The ever-present problem with this kind of ambitious science fiction epic is that it falls between stools: either there is too much windy exposition, of which the most egregious example would be The Matrix trilogy, or not nearly enough, as would seem to be the case in Ad Astra. Whilst never failing to be visually engaging and often spectacular, Ad Astra is nonetheless an austere cinematic experience.  The absence of any real emotional resonance, and the presence of so many elements that are dubious and enigmatic, ultimately weighs down and undermines the screenplay long before the end.