Review | Venice 2019: Ad Astra film review – Brad Pitt shines in James Gray’s philosophical sci-fi masterpiece
- Brad Pitt gives a career defining performance in this beautifully shot and scripted film
- James Gray makes good use of his big budget, which is reflected in the set pieces and camera work
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5/5 stars
Premiering in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, James Gray’s Ad Astra is a remarkable science fiction work that feels destined for major love in the coming awards season.
From films like Two Lovers to The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z, Gray has always produced such beautiful works. But Ad Astra, the seventh film of his 25-year career, is a huge step up, in terms of ambition, scope and execution.
Set in the near future, it is the story of Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), a highly capable astronaut who, when we first see him, narrowly evades death during an accident on the International Space Antenna, caused by a cosmic power surge.
Intriguingly, government officials believe these ray bursts have come from the planet Neptune, which McBride’s “legend” of a father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), travelled to years earlier in charge of an exploratory mission called the Lima Project.
Clifford never returned, believed dead, but McBride is told that he may now be alive, and responsible for this Earth threatening surge. McBride’s mission is to travel to Mars, the furthest human-populated outpost in the solar system, where he can broadcast a message to the Lima Project in the hope of making contact with his father.
In a very neat touch, Roy must first travel to the Moon, under cover of a commercial Virgin flight (where he amusingly gets charged US$125 for a blanket and pillow – some things, it seems, never change).
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Written by Gray and Ethan Gross, Ad Astra is best described as a philosophical sci-fi, one that deals with inner space as much as the stars beyond. McBride’s turbulent relationship with his father dominates his voice-over, while he also seems haunted by memories of his wife (Liv Tyler).
But Gray also conjures some spectacular, thrilling set pieces, from a brilliantly conceived moon buggy sequence to a chilling mayday encounter in deep space.
Aesthetically, Ad Astra is a thing of beauty. Given a sizeable budget for the first time in his career, Gray puts it all on screen. Sequences on Mars, shot in shadowy orange glows, are wonderful to look at.
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What really impresses, though, is a script that reaches far deeper than most Hollywood sci-fi films, and a lead actor in Pitt, who is at the peak of his powers. The antithesis to his joyous turn in Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood , this is one of the performances of his career.
