Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.
What is it with space movies and fathers? We all felt that little twinge of disappointment when we sat through that whole Contact movie, and the alien ended up appearing as Jodie Foster's father. And yet, from Contact, to Interstellar, to The Empire Strikes Back, filmmakers have some strange compulsion to take a good, original sci fi epic and tack on that most hackneyed of stories, our relationships with our dads. It was already a cliché when Sophocles scratched Oedipus Rex onto a sheet of papyrus with a reed pen, but 2,500 years later, filmmakers keep doubling down. Do they think that we can’t appreciate the vastness of the universe and the wonders of space exploration unless they “humanize” them for us? That everything has to be brought down to the level of a father missing his son's soccer game?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying never do a story about father figures. If it has some unique twist on the subject, it’s worth seeing. 2017’s Logan comes to mind, and there have been other fine treatments of the theme. Sadly, Ad Astra, which opens this weekend, isn’t one of them.
Not that it's a bad movie. The plot is basically Apocalypse Now in space: a military officer, operating far from the control of his superiors, has gone rogue, and another soldier, more junior, is sent on a journey to confront him. In this case, the rogue officer is Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legend in the U.S. Space Command (apparently Trump’s “Space Force” really came to be). Years before, he led a mission to the outer reaches of the solar system, but contact with him had long since been lost.
When earth is hit by a surge of cosmic rays, disrupting communications, destroying electronics, and creating explosions and chaos all over the planet, his son Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), also an astronaut, is called in for a top secret briefing from a roomful of generals. They inform him the Surge originated from Neptune and they believe it is linked to McBride Senior. The brass don’t know whether he has developed some sort of weapon, or the Surge has some other cause, but they want Major McBride to try to re-establish communications with his dad. A straightforward mission, and yet the generals don’t seem to be telling McBride all they know.
In any case, McBride is launched on a journey of planet-hopping across the solar system, starting with the moon and Mars. The mood varies between the paranoid--close up shots of the interior of claustrophobic space capsules--and the awe-inspiring--spectacular panoramas of outer space (more on that later). There’s a decent amount of excitement along the way, and between action scenes McBride has long stretches of travel time to come to terms with the emotional scars left by a father whose job was more important to him than his wife and son, a father who left home, never to return. Talk about the distant father cliché. Hard to get more distant than Neptune.
There are also many mistakes in physics, and those who enjoy picking at that sort of thing will have a field day. The technical consultant, Robert Yowell, has an impressive resume of 30 years experience on space projects, but this is his first movie. Just to take one example: gravity. I could believe that there might be earth-like gravity indoors in a moon base, thanks to some sort of artificial gravity technology which is never explained. But normal gravity outdoors on Mars, where objects in the real world weigh only 37% of what they do on earth, pushes the limits of credibility.
And yet, Ad Astra has many things going for it. It has been praised for the realism of the space technology, and some of this is deserved. The rockets, spacesuits, landing modules, and launch facilities are familiar to us from the ones we’ve seen in our own lifetimes, but projected into the future just enough to make a mission to Neptune believable.
The acting is stellar. As an astronaut with a famous dad, Major McBride is a public figure with a certain persona that he’s expected to live up to: per his own opening lines, “steady, calm, ready to do my job to the best of my abilities.” And yet he’s falling apart. Brad Pitt puts in an excellent performance as a man who is supposed to be holding it together, and is faking it. Kudos also to Tommy Lee Jones for his portrayal of a once towering figure who’s now confused and on the border of senility, if not past it. And MCU fans will be delighted to see Ruth Negga, Agents of Shield's Raina, in a small but pivotal role as the administrator of the Mars base.
And then there’s the space porn. No, not that kind. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean stunning cinematography of spacecraft blasting off and landing, planetary landscapes, starry skies. The trailer doesn't do justice to it, but it will give you a flavor at least:
One scene, in particular stood out for me: during a chase across the lunar surface, when McBride’s moon buggy crosses the terminator from day to night, the stars suddenly come out and adorn a sky that a moment before had been a solid field of black. Beautiful.
Indeed, despite its flaws, Ad Astra is well worth seeing just for the eye candy. Preferably in IMAX, where you can feel the shaking of the rockets, and see the stunning vistas of space fill your field of view.
| Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com |
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