Not an epic but Pitt shines like the son
AD ASTRA ★★★ (12A, 123 mins) BRAD Pitt is having quite a year. After his brilliant performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, his star continues to shine in James Gray’s mournful space adventure. Sadly, his trip to Neptune takes a path that feels just a little too well trodden.
Ad Astra is a film that wears its influences on its hermetically sealed spacesuit sleeve.The impressive effects owe a debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spectacular set-pieces orbit close to Gravity and the plot is beamed straight in from Apocalypse Now.
Like Martin Sheen’sWillard in Apocalypse Now, Pitt’s astronaut Major Roy McBride is on a secret mission to track down a missing all-American hero who has lost his marbles on an expedition into the unknown.
Pitt’s flinty performance keeps us watching but Ad Astra’s familiarity means it never really takes off.
We meet Major Roy as he dangles on the side of the International Space Antennae, a vast floating telegraph pole that punctures the boundary between “near-future” Earth and space.
When it’s hit with a series of mysterious radiation blasts, Roy watches another astronaut tumble to earth. But the unflappable hero calmly freedives to a lower section of the structure and hits the off switch to stop the blast from spreading.
US military outfit SpaceCom traces the blasts to the Lima Project, a space station that disappeared near Neptune 16 years earlier.
The leader of the mission was Roy’s dad Clifford. His disappearance hit young Roy hard but his bosses believe he is still alive.
Roy, who has an ability to remain almost inhumanly calm in stressful
situations (he takes the Blade Runner 2049 psych tests in his stride), is sent to persuade his dad to shut off his seismic weapon.
As Neptune is a fair schlep, he will have to change rockets at the Moon and Mars.The first leg, where he partners up with Donald Sutherland’s retired astronaut, lets Roy stage a thrilling Mad Maxstyle moon buggy chase with a gang of space pirates.
The set-pieces are great but the tension sags in the moody, clunky segments where Roy gazes at the stars and, in the clunky voiceover, gazes at his navel.
When he says he has developed “an ability to compartmentalise”, it sounds like Pitt reading his character notes rather than something Roy would think.
People are still watching Apocalypse Now (a 40th anniversary Blu-ray was released on Monday) but, in the very near future, no one will be talking about this.