BRAD LOST 12A
Star launches on a mission to Neptune, but
ARE the Seventies making a comeback?
The great Joaquin Phoenix looks certain to win an Oscar nomination for turning Batman’s nemesis into Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle in next month’s brilliant The Joker.
But first, Brad Pitt takes the plot of Apocalypse Now into space in director James Gray’s mournful sci-fi story.
While this is one revival I can definitely get behind (the Seventies was my golden age of Hollywood), Brad’s underpowered trip to Neptune takes a path that feels a little too well-trodden.
Like Martin Sheen’s Willard, Pitt’s astronaut Major Roy McBride is on a secret mission to track down a missing allAmerican hero who has lost his marbles on an expedition into the unknown.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam classic (which itself borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart Of Darkness) isn’t Gray’s only “homage”.
The special effects owe an obvious debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the psychological tests Roy has to keep taking are beamed straight in from Blade Runner 2049 and the action scenes are in a close orbit to 2014’s Oscar-winner Gravity.
Pitt’s flinty performance and the visually impressive set-pieces keep us watching, but the familiarity and episodic structure make it a very difficult film to engage with.
And the movie, set in the “near future”, never quite manages to live up to the promise of its thrilling opening.
Major Roy is dangling on the side of the International Space Antennae, a vast floating telegraph pole that punctures the boundary between Earth and space.
When it is hit by a series of mysterious radiation blasts, Roy watches another astronaut tumble to Earth. But our unflappable hero calmly freedives to a lower section of the structure and hits the “off” switch.
US military outfit SpaceCom traces the blasts to the Lima Project, a space station which disappeared close to Neptune 16 years earlier.
The leader of the mission was Roy’s dad Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones). His disappearance hit the young Roy hard, but his bosses are convinced he is alive and has gone the full Colonel Kurtz.
Roy, who has an ability to remain almost inhumanly calm in stressful situations, is sent to persuade him 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 Colonel Pruitt, lets Roy stage a Mad Max-style moon buggy chase with a gang of space pirates.
But tension sags in the moody bits inbetween the set-pieces where we see Roy gazing at the stars and hear him gazing at his