Endless rather than infinite!

Ad Astra A film which manages to offer in all seriousness lines such as ‘You’ll never get to Neptune without me’ really ought to be rather more exciting than Ad Astra actually is.

When you are travelling 2.714billion miles, obviously you could not really hope to be on the edge of your seat the whole way there... but neither do you really want to be so comprehensively slumped at the back of it.

Ad Astra deals with sober, ponderous and clearly important issues and is very obviously a film of the highest intelligence, but none of that particularly adds up to interesting... until, of course, a final sequence which is certainly thought-provoking. And while it does not quite justify the journey, the film – maybe rather annoyingly – leaves you with the impression that you have actually watched something quite special .... special in the sense that you will enjoy far more thinking about it than you ever did watching it. You might even end up convincing yourself it was a rattling good yarn. It truth, it was not.

It all starts off, in a not too distant future, with the world being threatened by far-distant surges with potentially close-up catastrophic consquences. Somehow, the US space high command comes to the conclusion that they might just be emanating from the long-since vanished astronaut H Clifford

Mcbride (a gnarly Tommy Lee Jones) who went AWOL years and years before while looking for intelligent life at the outer reaches of the solar system.

The high command deems that the perfect person to go and sort him out is his obviously-estranged son Roy Mcbride (Brad Pitt). Mcbride senior managed to kill off his crew, and it is not long before Mcbride junior does the same. At times there’s a bit of a Heart of Darkness vibe going on as Brad tracks down the rebel who’s gone rogue; equally there are some twisted father-son dynamics going on which bubble over nicely once

Brad finally gets there and challenges a father who was far too concerned with the possibility of distant aliens to bother too much about his nearest and distant. And inevitably that confrontation is the best bit of the film– and the bit that sends you home. But for the rest of it, you certainly won’t have a sense our survival is at stake.